


Sand and Glass

by Tierfal



Series: Leading the Blind [8]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Drama, Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Romance, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-29
Packaged: 2019-06-11 01:06:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 38,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15304050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: Ed and Roy have a nice little working weekend trip to Ishval planned.  What could possibly go wrong?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It has been… a very long time since I wrote in this 'verse – long enough, as you may have noticed, that my writing style has changed, and now I am incapable of telling a story at the rate I used to when I started this series.  This sequel piece is longer than the original fic. o_o'
> 
> It was also written for silmil-p-ain, who has been a big supporter of this series since very early on, and had a bigger impact than I think they know on my staying in this fandom for as long as I have. ♥♥♥
> 
> Anyway… hi, hello, welcome back, enjoy. ♥ There will be more of this soon – probably next weekend! The rest is long since done and just needs some edits, but I've really been struggling to have faith in any of my work lately, so I'm trying to ease myself back into sharing stuff. Have fun with the expository schmoop in the meantime, I hope! ^^;

Ed fills his canister mug, screws the lid on, and makes a truly valiant attempt at a break for the door.

Despite the fact that Roy is (significantly) blind; and (slightly less significantly, but noteworthy nonetheless) sitting at the kitchen table with his back turned—apparently engrossed in an alchemically-lit newspaper, a mug of the coffee, and a plate of toast—the insuppressible bastard’s hand snaps out and catches Ed’s sleeve.  Roy doesn’t even look up, although Ed has to admit that that part would be a little redundant these days.

Roy does clear his throat, however, and then employ Amestris’s all-time-favorite radio voice to speak the words: “Coffee does not count as breakfast, my dearest love.”

“Shows what you know,” Ed says, but he can’t wriggle hard enough to twist free of Roy’s grip without jeopardizing the coffee.  “Leggo already.  I put sugar in it—it’s got calories and caffeine.  Isn’t that the entire point of breakfast?”

Roy gives him a marginally misdirected but utterly unmistakable Look.

Ed was an idiot to shack up with the owner of the single fastest, strongest, and by and large sexiest pair of hands in Amestris.  The award-winners in question are still fixed in his sleeve, despite several increasingly concentrated attempts to pry Roy’s fingers loose.

“Save that tyrant shit for the office,” Ed says.  “Coffee does so count, and you’re not the boss of me, a—”

“I am well-aware,” Roy says, tugging without loosening his grip, “that I have never been your boss except in name, and that you are definitively your own now, more even than in the days when I unleashed you on the unsuspecting nation and duly paid the damages.”

“You still can’t prove anything,” Ed says, but he can tell that he’s going to lose the physical battle this time, because the only ways to get loose would involve injuring Roy’s hand in the process, and that’s not a compromise he’s willing to make.

Bastard thinks of _everything_.

Ed uses his ankle to pull out the chair next to the bastard in question and drops into it, setting his coffee down on the tabletop.

“My point,” Roy says, “is that despite the fact that you’ve taken self-employment as an excuse to drive yourself ten times harder than any supervisor who wished to keep you ever would, you technically set your own hours, so you can technically spare five measly minutes to sit with your lonely lover and have a morsel of a proper breakfast.”

“‘Lonely’?” Ed says.  “Since when are you lonely?  I’m pretty sure lonely people don’t make so much noise while they’re getting massages that their partners’ brothers have to kick the wall ten times to get their point across.”

“That is a heinous and unsubstantiated rumor,” Roy says.  “And although I will confess I was distracted, I only remember him kicking it twice.”

“ _Besides_ ,” Ed says.  “You and me are going on a trip in two days, unless you canceled or double-booked or intentionally forgot.”

“Ah, yes,” Roy says.  “An extremely romantic getaway to spend the weekend working in Ishval, so that I can schmooze and politic and ingratiate a little while you attempt to invigorate the economy and provide stable wages, because you really are the sort of small business-owner that all the others claim to be.”

“We’ll have time for some romantic shit,” Ed says.

Roy gives him another fractionally off-center Look, with a distinctly different character this time.

“Jeez,” Ed says.  “You’re the Führer, aren’t you?  Can’t you just, like, make a holiday?”

“I might well be tempted to abuse my power in such a fashion,” Roy says, “if I thought there was even the slightest chance you wouldn’t work straight through it.”

Ed opens his mouth to say _Well, now it sounds like a challenge_ , but then…

Then he notices the funny little twist at the corner of Roy’s mouth.

It’s really subtle, but he’s gotten a hell of a lot better at Roy’s particular brand of really subtle over the years.

“Okay, okay,” he says, but he lets the lousy traitor softness that thrives perpetually in his chest filter through into his voice a little bit.  “If you really wanna take some time and run away to some beach in Creta where the press and the assassins and whoever won’t be able to find you, then… tell me when.  And I’ll set it aside.  For real.”

He doesn’t say _For you_ , because he doesn’t have to.

“You know,” Roy says, innocently, but the twist smoothes out, and that’s all Ed was hoping for; “I hear they have extraordinarily good food.”

“Well, shit,” Ed says.  “Why didn’t you say that first?”

“You were so busy boycotting breakfast that I wasn’t sure you’d be interested,” Roy says.  He feels his way down to the edge of his plate, then tests the corners of his slice of toast, and then tears off a little piece of it.  He holds it up about halfway between them, an unspoken but highly preferable arrangement instituted after the incident with the melted chocolate all over Ed’s face, hair, and expensive rented tux.  Ed catches Roy’s outstretched wrist gently and then leans forward and nips the bite from between his fingers.

He has to admit, he’s kind of impressed at how evenly Roy spread the jam despite lacking the obvious advantage of being able to see his own work.  Every now and again, it throws Ed brand-new just how much he takes for granted where that goes—what a damn marvel it is how Roy wrangles his way towards self-sufficiency every single day with a combination of incredibly acute hearing and sheer stubbornness.

Hitomi perks up from where she’s been lying under the table with her head resting on Roy’s feet.  She flicks her ears back and forth, and then her tongue lolls out.

Roy either hears it or senses it by way of his ever-strengthening telepathic link to the dog.  “None for you, I’m afraid, my second-dearest love.”

“Ouch,” Al says, sauntering in from the hallway on soundless sock feet.  “Nice to know I don’t even chart.  Although I suppose that since you’re the Führer, you can legally change my name to ‘Chopped Liver’ right here and save us all some time.”

“Alphonse,” Roy says smoothly, betrayed by the beginning of a grin.  “Would I forget you?  Ludicrous thought.  How does first-and-a-half-dearest sound to you?”

“Mathematically tenuous,” Al says.

Ed loves him.

Ed is also planning to make it worse.

“Where does that leave Colonel Hawkeye?” he asks.

Roy winces.  “Ah… I think she’ll have to tie for first.  Sorry, Alphonse.”

Al shrugs.  “I’m only sorry to learn that we’ve put a nation we nearly died defending into the hands of a man who can’t do math.”

“You wound me,” Roy says.  “Don’t I get enough libel from the press?”

“Evidently not,” Al says, crossing to the coffee, “since you haven’t learned your lesson.”

Three things occur to Ed more or less simultaneously: one, that he wants more of Roy’s toast; two, that if he takes more of Roy’s toast, he’ll be obligated to produce additional toast for Roy in recompense; and three, that his precious angel-brother is _brutal_ before he’s had caffeine.

“Jeez, Al,” he says.  “At least let him finish breakfast first.”

“No, it’s a good thing,” Roy says before Al can try to roll his eyes right out of his own skull.  “This is an important political lesson—even if you try to be exceedingly clever, you can’t please everyone without receiving criticism when you stretch the truth.”

“Nice PR spin,” Al says, pouring generously.  “Here I thought I was just being a jerk.”

“Nonsense,” Roy says.

“If this is your way of apologizing for the noise last night,” Al says, which makes Ed choke on the first breath that felt like it was going to be normal, “it’s working.”

Roy grins broadly, which does not help with Ed’s breathing problem.  “I may have to confess to that particular ulterior motive,” Roy says.

With his third observation resolved, Ed attends to the first pair.  He tears off an approximately two-bite segment of Roy’s toast, crams it all into his mouth at once, and gets up to go in search of the bread so that he can make more.  The search is, blessedly, brief: Roy is not in the habit of utilizing objects like breadboxes, since the aesthetic order of the countertops matters much less to him now than it might have in prior years.  Ed’s always down for leaving crap lying around, because it usually makes things easier—although when the counters get too cluttered, Roy has to feel around all over them for several minutes, looking increasingly concerned, before he can find whatever thing it is he wants, so there’s a sweet spot with the entropy.

Ed supposes that’s sort of true of everything.

“What kind of jam do you want, Fearless Leader?” he asks.

“Are you making me more toast?” Roy asks, like it’s a surprise or something.

“Can you make me some, too?” Al asks.

Hitomi’s tail _ptat_ s on the floor as she starts to wag it, which Ed’s guessing qualifies as a similar statement in dog language.

“Bunch of moochers,” Ed says.

“I think you started it,” Al says.

“How about smoochers?” Roy asks.

“What kind of jam?” Ed asks, louder this time.

“You,” Roy says.  “You’re jamazing.”

“I love you both,” Al says, “but I am counting down the minutes until you leave for Ishval right now.”

“I jam, too,” Ed says.

“ _Kill me_ ,” Al says.

It’s really a shame Roy can’t see the poor kid’s face, because it’s such a masterpiece that Ed laughs until his diaphragm hurts.

  


* * *

  


If there’s one thing Ed misses about being in the military, it’s having someone to make all the fiddly little travel arrangements for you—or not having to make them at all, because someone hands you the train tickets, and you’re off, and you make the rest of it up as you go; and if sometimes things blow up in the general vicinity, that obviously has nothing to do with your presence.  Obviously.

This whole business-running thing is a big pain in the ass for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that the Incomparable Lacey, whom most people would probably call his secretary, is also his accountant, and having her eyes on the numbers is much more important than having them on his booking at an inn in Ishval that doesn’t merit any descriptions in any of the travel guides because the travel guides are stupid at best and racist at worst.  Probably it’s racism.  Probably—

Well.  That’s half the point of going.

Lacey, in typical Incomparable Lacey fashion, has done an incomparable job getting him all of the contacts he’ll need for the local contractors who have been speccing out the land for him, and the legal people and the religious experts and the governing officials.

There’s still a Lieutenant-Colonel stationed up there, permanently as far as anybody can tell, to keep an eye on the Ishvalan governor, which pisses Ed off so much that he has to stop himself from thinking about it.  If it was somebody like Miles, who had a stake in it, who _understood_ on a more fundamental level than any of the rest of them could, that might be different—but Ed looked the guy up, and he’s blond and blue-eyed, born in West City.  He fought a little bit in Aerugo, which is how he earned—“earned”, maybe—his stripes.  Ed has no fucking clue why that qualifies him to help the surviving inhabitants of a decimated region struggle back to their feet, but the military’s like that.  Fuery doesn’t know the guy, and Roy says Parliament won’t budge on removing the military presence just yet.  Apparently his record’s clean as a whistle, and the fogeys and the holdouts have enough votes to keep him there.  When Ed pushed about it, Roy got the tired eyes—the deep-tired eyes—and said that this was one of those tiny wars of attrition that it’s simply going to take time stacked on time stacked on time for anyone to win.  Ed didn’t keep pushing after that.

Hell, maybe he can help.  Maybe if this whole venture’s successful enough, it’ll prove that Ishval’s economically really viable and self-sufficient, and that might change people’s minds a little bit.  Maybe if a powerful partnership comes of this, and it benefits those stupid up-top bastards in blue enough, they’ll loosen their grip a little, and Roy can gently push Lieutenant-Colonel Nepotism out of his seat, and what an awful shame if there’s no one handy to fill it, and…

Maybe a lot of things.

Maybes don’t mean much until you pursue them to the point of a yes or a no.

  


* * *

  


Ed straggles home not especially later than usual, although it feels like he crammed a temporally improbable amount into the regular number of hours.  It feels—good.  It feels good to be tired because you’ve been productive; tired because you’re _useful_ ; tired because you’re making things to help people with.  Or facilitating the making of such things, more or less, at this point.  The facilitating part is a lot harder than Ed realized before he started trying to do it himself.  There’s so many little nitpicky things like zoning laws and permits to install the equipment to manufacture the objects, and figuring out how they’ll get packaged and how they’ll get shipped, and calculating what the cumulative costs of all of those things plus fair wages look like, and…

And he’s starting to sympathize with Roy’s enduring vendetta against paperwork, which is a really scary prospect all around.

Alchemically-supported prosthetic organs has been a harder nut to crack than he’d been hoping, particularly with the ongoing expansion of the things-that-light-up business—some of the problem, at least, is that he never has time to get bored, and getting bored is what helps him best to think.  Mental stimulus helps, too, but it’s got to be the kind where your mind has space to wander, like when you’re on a train too long, and you’ve got things you should be doing but don’t want to.

These days, there’s just so much… stuff.  There’s so much to check on with the existing factory, modest as it is; there’s so much to plan for the new one; there are so many stupid little details just in his _life_ —just getting through the day.  Roy outsources some of it, like when there’s problems with the car and whatever, and Al helps out, but somebody’s got to figure out dinner for three every day; and somebody’s got to make sure the cats get food, too; and Hitomi has to get brushed a lot, or she sheds _worse_ ; and Roy has to get brushed, or his hair looks hilarious; and Al’s thinking about becoming a doctor, which is actually perfect to finish the triumvirate of types of knowledge that Ed and Winry need to become unstoppable, but Ed doesn’t want to push him, and it means even more tuition that’ll have to be paid from somewhere; and…

And.

And maybe Roy’s onto something about the vacation thing, purely because Ed’s brain could use a break.  It’ll probably come back brighter and fresher and cleaner if he forces himself to take some time away from all of the ordinary minutiae, and that might propel him towards the paradigm shifter that he’s been waiting for.

He should also probably bribe Winry to come visit for a couple of days or something.  If he and Al and Winry sat around and spitballed for a whole night, they’d eventually get sleep-deprived enough to come up with some _wild_ ideas, and those are always the best ones.  Roy could probably help, too, but Ed always feels bad leveraging his intellect when Führer Photo-Ready has to spend so much of his genius navigating the shark-invested politics ocean as it is.  It seems unfair to force him to think critically any more than he already has to, although maybe a totally different topic would be a nice change for him, too, and…

And damn, Roy’s going to be so smug when Ed eventually ends up accidentally admitting that the bastard was right, and taking a weekend off is a brilliant plan.

He can see that the lights are on in the living room when he reaches the house.

He checks his watch—Roy got him a _wristwatch_ for his last birthday, like he’s some kind of ordinary person who cares more about the time of day than about fumbling around with a status symbol plastered with the Amestrian chimera that likes to hide deep in his pocket.  It’s just a little after six, which makes it equal odds for Roy to be back at this hour, and either way Al’s probably home.

Al has turned into a proper cat-hoarding recluse over the last few years: he still occasionally goes out with girls or meets school friends at one of the local pubs, but mostly he seems to prefer reading at home, pinned to the couch by the weight of a fuzzbucket.  Ed has to admit that he approves—at the very least, it greatly reduces the chances of anything untoward happening to Al while he’s not there to… 

Well, that’s part of the bitch of it, isn’t it?  What _would_ he do?  Sure, he’s a long damn way yet from helpless, but things are—different.  Things are really different.  The monsters are all people now, but they’re still dangerous; they just attack you in other ways.  They’re every bit as bloodthirsty as the homunculi ever were—they just dress it up and smile to hide it, and that makes it _harder_.  At least with a fang-bearing, purple-eyed enemy, you knew what you were going to get.  The ones they have these days—

Ed’s just… glad Al’s not out alone late at night very often.  That’s all.  And glad that not that many people recognize him; glad that he’s eked his way out of the background of most of the photographs; glad that what the public remembers is a suit of armor with delicate mannerisms and a child’s voice.  Glad that Al’s not a target these days until somebody learns his last name.

Ed’s got enough to worry about, after all.

Like his dumbass, workaholic boyfriend hogging the entire couch, having managed to spare not a single square inch, sprawled out with one foot propped up on the armrest and the other buried underneath a cat.

Hitomi doesn’t look thrilled about the position, either, although it’s probably the cat decoration part of it that she objects to the most.  She’s lying down just beside the couch, head resting on her paws, looking vaguely displeased.  She barely glances up when Ed lets himself in.

Roy doesn’t glance up at all, because he’s passed out with a sheaf of glowing papers on his medal-laden chest.

“Jeez,” Ed says under his breath, trying to shut the door more quietly than he opened it.  “Tellin’ me _I_ need to take a break.”

Hitomi huffs something that’s either judgment or agreement, and there’s not much for it either way.

Ed hangs his bag up by the door, actually leans down to untie his shoes—normally kicking at the backs for a couple minutes is sufficient to beat the laces, but stealth requires compromises—and then crosses to the couch, making sure to keep the metal foot well clear of any susceptibly soft animals.

Slowly, gingerly, appreciating having two sets of pressure-sensitive fingertips, he slides the papers out from under Roy’s folded arm, tugging them in cautious little one-centimeter increments.  Roy’s breath catches for a second when one of the top papers rustles against a fold in his sleeve, and Ed thinks he screwed the pooch—no offense towards Hitomi intended—but then Roy sighs and settles again.

Ed bites his lip on the _“Hypocrite”_ waiting on the tip of his tongue, since it would either jeopardize Roy’s beauty sleep or come out unforgivably adoring or both.

He can’t do much about the rest of it, past extracting Roy’s pen from between his fingers and laying it on the table with the paperwork and then fetching one of their flannel blankets to lay over all of the parts of Roy not currently covered in cat.  When he’s done a reasonably good tucking job, relying on years of practice bundling Al into bed way back in the day, followed by several more recent opportunities when the damn kid’s slowly-thickening body couldn’t retain any heat, he stands back, shoves his hands into his pockets, and gives in to the curious urge to just… look.

Stupid bastard Roy’s always been gorgeous—sleeping, waking, yawning, smirking, overreacting, watching way too astutely, laughing at Ed’s dumb jokes.  Obviously he doesn’t do the second-to-last, exactly, anymore; but he does the lattermost so much it’s uncanny, so there’s that.

Back in the day, Ed walked in on him sleeping in his office once, just draped over the office chair with his neck at a _terrible_ angle, looking like a broken marionette, but he doesn’t remember the experience well enough to compare it to how an unconscious Roy looks these days.  Ed was so damn busy back then—and the part of him that knew that he didn’t have time for wonderment or wistfulness or pining for anything he couldn’t have and probably wouldn’t get had shoved all of the fascination with Roy down to the bottom of the denial box and slammed the lid.

Doesn’t matter anyway.  Roy was gorgeous then, whether Ed let himself care about it or not; and he’s gorgeous now.  It’s pretty obnoxious, really, because it makes Ed want to do ridiculous shit like reaching out and stroking his hair back off of his forehead and kissing his stupid little nose.  It’s cute—Roy’s nose.  His forehead is, too.

And it’s… funny.  It always used to make him feel warm and safe and gently giddy just seeing Al—when they were kids, even, especially after Mom died.  Al was all he had, sure, but Al was also just so _great_.  Even then, Ed appreciated a lot of the little things Al was good at that he wasn’t, and a part of him recognized that he was a pain in the ass, and putting up with him was a public service.  The armor didn’t change much: the best person on the planet was the best person on the planet even if they didn’t have skin or hair to pat or warmth to leach or ribs to nudge with an elbow anymore.  Having Al at his back or his side or anywhere in the vicinity made him stronger no matter what the visual particulars were.

Roy must know a thing or two about that these days, albeit coming from a different angle.  But that’s the thing—Ed always figured it was just _Al_ , but it’s not.  It’s a love thing.  It’s a love thing when the devotion runs _deep_.

He just feels… good, every single damn time he looks at Roy.  He feels safe, and pleased, and weirdly kind of proud—not precisely that he landed such a fine piece of ass, although that’s part of it; maybe just… proud to be close to someone so damn great.  He feels contented.  He feels at-home.

But with Roy there’s also that sear-edged bubble of just how goddamn _hot_ he is.  Even teetering close to forty, even having given up on fussing with his appearance because he can’t see it anyway, even crashed out on the couch at an awkward angle in his uniform with dark circles underneath his eyes—

He’s just so damn _beautiful_ , and the worst part about it is that he’s the kind where it runs right through, and the best parts of his good looks start to speak to what’s underneath them, too.  The stupid smile always looks sweet now, and Ed can’t help thinking about all of the thoughtful little shit he does even though he’s so busy that his prior procrastinator self would probably keel over at the thought.  The little quirks and archings and expressive things he does with his eyebrows harken back to his sense of humor, and past the snark and the sarcasm, that’s always weirdly sort of generous, too; and even the smirks aren’t annoying anymore, because they’re usually a prelude to something warm and often wet and always satisfying.  Ed loved those stupid hands before they ever touched him gently; he paid too much attention to that stupid mouth long before it ever grazed his skin like a benediction made flesh a hundred-hundred-thousand wonderful times—

People are just projections of the things they do, aren’t they?  That was why Al never lost his figurative luster when he was locked up in the shining steel.  Bodies are just meat; they’re just bones wrapped up in gristle and skin; they have no inherent value past what they can convey.

But when they carry somebody important, you really have to take care of them.

Ed reaches out and grazes the pad of his right thumb over Roy’s cheekbone, so lightly that it probably feels more like a breath than a brush.

He’s got two good hands, now.  Two warm ones—strong enough to build with, soft enough to touch.

Hitomi’s watching him, probably wondering why he’s been standing here for the better part of five minutes, contemplating life and love and letting your exhausted boyfriend sleep on the couch in a way that will probably crick his neck in the long run, when he could be making and providing food for her charge instead.  Dogs are good about remembering food.

Ed’s normal strategy when he’s in charge of dinner is to bang the cupboards open and shut a little, but since that’s partly just to make sure Roy and Al both hear it and come over to make suggestions anyway, it’s not too strange an adjustment to try to do it quietly.  A soft padding heralds the arrival of Hitomi, who looks—literally, that is—rather more hangdog than is her habit.

“Did nobody feed you?” he asks her, just above a whisper—her ears’ll pick it up, and it’s not like she’s liable to answer anyway.  “I mean, I guess Mr. Ruler of the Nation and Known Universe drooling on the couch over there probably meant to before he fell asleep, but…”

He gets a pot of water on the stove and then fills up her food bowl, but she just circles around it once in a dejected sort of way and then lies down again, chin dropping onto her paws like before.  Ed crouches down next to her and strokes at her ears, which at least makes her close her eyes in a slightly more happy-looking sort of way.

“What’s wrong?” he asks, but that question’s got the same inherent problem as the last one.

She makes a faint noise of what sounds remarkably like acknowledgment in her throat, which… would be really, _really_ creepy if logic wasn’t ready to fly to the rescue in Ed’s brain and remind him that she’s probably picked up the whole audible response thing to help Roy understand when she’s on the same page as he is.  It’s not that she’s a freaky, semi-psychic dog-chimera gradually approaching human speech.

The ear scritches settle her down a little.  She’s still not eating, though, which makes Ed sort of uncomfortable on general principle, because eating is great, and choosing not to do it smacks of something being seriously amiss.

He tries to keep an eye on her while he attends to the pasta and scrounging up things that they can put on top of it, but she’s just sort of lying there, curled up near her food bowl and gazing into open air.  Her ears are down low.  Maybe she’s just too damn tired, too.  Ishval’s probably not going to be much of a relief for her, poor thing; she hates sand almost as much as rain, and unfamiliar places always put her on edge.

If he thought it wouldn’t end in a dinner disaster to rival the Great Toaster Oven Fire of 1919 and wake Roy up to boot, he’d call over at the university library and see if Al’s hanging around.  It’s highly likely he got wrapped up in a good book and forgot that things like homes and meals and brothers who fret about your dumb ass exist at all.

Ed’s got something like a spaghetti sauce simmering in a pan by the time the pasta’s done, and he hasn’t even splattered any of it on his shirt yet, which is an accomplishment that merits celebration.  He sort of has to give up on the whole striving-for-silence thing when he pours out the pasta water, but since he figures dinner’s a good apology for interrupted sleep, maybe that’ll even out.

Sure enough, as he’s shaking the colander, he hears some telltale shifting from the living room, followed by an even more telltale indignant “ _Mrow_ ” from the cat that was on Roy’s foot and a bleary “Terribly sorry, dear” in response.

Ed’s going to give that bastard so much shit for using the same pet names for him and for the cats.

But… later, maybe.  Right now he’s focused on feeding himself, the Führer of Amestris, and theoretically a certain absentee brother who had better not stay out too late, or Ed’ll eat his share just to spite him.

Roy’s footsteps pad up behind him as he’s adding a smidge more pepper to the sauce, because pepper’s good for you, and it makes everything more exciting, and the risk of sneezing near red sauce is apparently not a deal-breaker when you’re as deranged as one Edward Elric.

The thing that never stops surprising him is how much he loves the _little_ things—the low-banked but insuppressible burning of the adulation in him at the detail shit, though he supposes it’s all underpinned by the big stuff anyway.

He loves the way Roy tilts his head just slightly when he’s crossing a room, listening for the rustle of Ed’s clothes to pinpoint his location.  He loves the way Roy stands, the way he walks—shoulders high but not squared, unhurried but unbowed.  He loves the way Roy reaches out slowly with one hand first, grazing his fingertips up Ed’s arm, following the curve of it to his shoulder-blade, to solidify Ed’s shape on the mental map before flattening a hand on his back.

Is it fucked up to appreciate something that was born out of the blindness—something necessitated by a struggle that’s never going to end?  He can’t help it: he loves all the little tiny gentle touches Roy doles out to him to compensate for not being able to see him.  Smiles are lies, sometimes, but touches are really damn hard to fake.  He loves Roy’s fingers.  He loves Roy’s hands.  He loves how much they run along his skin, slide through his hair, caress his face like he’s something _worth_ memorizing; like he’s indescribably precious—

“Hey,” he says as Roy sidles one step sideways, moving directly behind him, and wraps both arms around his waist.  Roy’s chin settles on his shoulder, which should be very, very annoying.  Damn it.  “I’m cookin’ for you here.”

“Can I say ‘What’s cookin’, good-lookin’?” Roy asks.

“No,” Ed says.  “Idiom privileges revoked on practical grounds.”

“Oh, Lord,” Roy says, slightly faintly.  “I’m the one who let you into spitting distance of politics—or the other way around, perhaps.  I did this to myself.  I have no one else to blame.”

“It’s politics,” Ed says.  “You’ve always got someone else to blame.”

Roy snuggles in a little closer, tucking his cheek in against Ed’s temple, which makes it obnoxiously difficult to stay snarky even when he starts sniffing overstatedly.

“May I suggest oregano?” he asks.

“You may do anything you want,” Ed says.  “It’s a free country.  Sort of.  Kind of.  Purportedly.”

Roy steps back, which is a bit of a pity, but it’s a better vantage for him to pantomime being stabbed in the heart.

“If it’s a matter of life and death,” Ed says, “I guess there’s time for oregano.  You know if Al alphabetized the spice cabinet again?”

“Probably,” Roy says.  “He does it when he’s stressed.”

Ed reaches up— _not_ on his tiptoes, mind; just… on… the… balls of his feet, a little, because it’s… comfortable—and determines that he needs to have a little heart-to-heart with Al and tell him that he’s perfect and wonderful and should cut back on caffeine, because their spice cabinet currently looks like the store model in a fancy-pants home goods boutique.

Ed then shakes some flakes of dried oregano into the sauce and stirs—carefully, because there are two sauce-susceptible bodies in splatter range now, and one of them has to wear that jacket in to meetings and stuff.  “There you go, Mr. Führer, sir.  I hope you’re happy.”

“Ecstatic,” Roy says, grinning.  “It smells delicious.”  He edges in again and somehow manages to pinpoint a moment when Ed’s preoccupied with portioning out the pasta, at which instant his palm gravitates onto Ed’s ass.  “Speaking of delicious—”

“Holy shit, Roy,” Ed says.  “Did you or did you not _just_ wake up from one of those crash-out exhaustion power naps that means you’re stretched too thin?”

Roy attempts at a stoic expression, but he’s trying not to laugh.  “It is hardly my fault that your ass is so easy to appreciate even without the benefit of sight.”

Ed eyes him, for all the good that does, and squirms away.  “ _Hard_ ly, huh?”

Roy’s arm snakes around his waist.  “…if you keep that up, imminently, yes.”

Ed elbows at him—very gently—to try to shepherd him out of sauce range.  “Food first, hanky-panky later.  You know the rules.”

“I can’t believe this,” Roy says, stepping back to accompany his over-the-top fake-offended tone with some vigorous arm-folding and head-shaking.  “I sacrifice most of the good years of my life dragging my weary body slowly upward through the ranks, finally haul my tormented being to the top, and then—in my own home—the angel of my esteem tells me I can’t flirt with him until after dinner?  They will write the most tragic odes ever put to paper about me, Edward, and it’s all y—”

He pauses, and his head’s tilted just a little bit again.

Then Ed hears it—keys in the lock.  The front door opens, but only a crack; by then Ed’s glancing over his shoulder.

Al’s hand inserts itself into the gap and waves around a little.

“Everybody decent?” he calls.

“‘Decent’ is highly debatable,” Roy says, “but we’re clothed.”

Ed elbows him again, a little less gently this time, but the bastard just grins.

“Would you prefer ‘lowly debatable’, my love?” Roy asks.

“At this rate,” Ed says, “you’re going to be brother-safe for a _long_ time, because you’re never getting laid again.”

“Sorry, Roy,” Al says, absolutely insincerely, as he comes into the kitchen.  “Ooh, spaghetti!”

  


* * *

  


Al tries to muscle his way in to do the dishes, but Ed kicks him—only a little bit literally—out into the living room to study instead.  Roy, bless his heart and his hands and his tired smile, dries while Ed washes, since that part requires rather less visual precision to do passably.  Time was, Ed wouldn’t have given much of a shit about this sort of thing—if there hadn’t been paper plates in the equation in the first place, he would probably have half-assed it, on the premise that not-particularly-clean dishes push your immune system to ever-greater heights of resilience, so they’re better for you in the long run.

These days, though… these days, any bacteria he can keep away from Al and Roy shaves a minute or two off of the worrying he has to wade through before he falls asleep.  Every little thing counts.  The minutiae stack up.  Taking care of people you care about, even in stupid kinds of ways, is its own reward.

It’s funny, the things that change you.  And the people.

As Ed hands over the second plate—making sure Roy’s got a grip on it, fingertips around the edge, before he lets go—Roy says, “You’re thinking rather loudly tonight.”

“Thinking’s nifty,” Ed says.  “You should try it sometime.  Especially if you are, as your campaign promises would have us believe, trying to keep us all out of the shitter here, a—”

“Slander,” Roy says mildly, circling the towel over the center of the plate so smoothly that you’d swear he could see it if you didn’t know.  His voice softens, and Ed’s willpower promptly follows suit, which is a pain in the ass and no mistake.  “Is it anything that might be suited to talking about after thinking, rather than to thinking alone?”

“That is the single fanciest way I’ve ever heard somebody ask what’s wrong,” Ed says.

“That is,” Roy says, “as I’m sure you are agonizingly aware, something of a specialty.”  He raises his eyebrows, feels for the edge of the countertop, feels for the stack of dishes, and sets the plate on top.  “Just as avoiding the question with tangential accusations is one of yours.”

“Bullshit,” Ed says.

“I rest my case,” Roy says.

“You’re gonna rest six feet under in a second if you d—” Roy’s laughter is so damn sweet and pure and delighted that Ed can’t even stay mad, which is worse than all the rest of it put together.  “Hey!  I’m threatening you here, asshole!  Least you can do is pay attention!”

Roy reaches out, and his fingertips catch on Ed’s shirt pocket—which apparently is handhold enough to curl one’s fingers into, the better to draw him in and wrap both arms around him tight.

“Worth a try,” Roy says.  “I’m listening if you change your mind.”

“You don’t have too many other options,” Ed says, but the way he just shoved his face into Roy’s collarbone probably gives him away.

He knows Roy’s smiling before he hears it in the bastard’s voice.  “I’m just figuratively-looking for a way to help.”

Ed makes a serious attempt at growling in the back of his throat in a reprimanding sort of way.  It doesn’t sound very reprimanding even to his own ears, though.  Growling is a very tricky thing that way; these days, at least where Roy’s concerned, it almost always comes out sounding awfully—

“Or,” Roy breathes into his ear, one capable hand curling itself almost too tight into his hair, “if you’d prefer, we could always approach it from the perspective that you might feel better after being fucked into the mattress for a while.”

Ed’s scalp tingles, and he’s starting to hear his heartbeat in his ears.  “Uh—I—I mean— _yeah_ , but—Al—”

“That reminds me,” Roy says, in that same velvet-ropes voice, one fingertip trailing slowly down Ed’s cheek.  “I’ve been meaning, for a while, to find out if it’s possible to keep you… quiet.”

Ed swallows.  He swallows again.  He strives not to notice how hot his face is, and his throat, and his… everything.  “I, um.  I dunno if—”

Roy’s finger curls under his chin, tilting his head up; the other hand tugs gently—but with unmistakable intention—on his hair.

“Hell with it,” Ed says before he can dig his brain out from under all the steam burgeoning in his system.  “Might as well give it a shot.”

Roy leans in, and Ed closes his eyes just before Roy’s mouth ghosts over his forehead, his eyelids, and then around along his jaw—warm breath trailing electricity, and it’s all Ed can do not to shiver—

“I was hoping,” Roy murmurs, “that you might say th—”

“Führer Mustang!” Al calls.

Ed can feel Roy’s smirk against his cheek, which should be… something.  Something bad.  Something terrible.  The arrogance of it should rankle, instead of just… simmering.  There’s definitely something simmery going on.  What a crock of shit.

Roy’s practically purring, though, and all of Ed’s muscles keep tightening in anticipation— “That just sounds natural, doesn’t it?  Well-earned, at the very l—”

“Your dog just puked on the rug!”

The sheer startlement makes Ed’s eyes pop open.

They stand there in silence for a long second, faces still pressed together.  Then Roy sighs—softly but deeply, with _feeling_ —and says only “Hubris” before he steps away.

Ed… continues to stand there, blinking, while Roy makes several strides towards the living room.

“Is she all right?” Roy’s asking as he moves.  The doorframe intervenes—his shoulder hits it hard enough that Ed winces on his behalf, but Roy doesn’t even slow down.  “What happened?”

“I dunno,” Al says.  “Maybe something she ate just disagreed with her.  Is that it, girl?  Your tummy feeling a little wonky tonight?”

Ed lives a strange life.  It’s good—it’s _really_ good—but sometimes it’s so pointedly bizarre that he has to pause and simply wonder at it.

But not for long.

“She didn’t have any of her dinner,” he says, grabbing up a roll of paper towels and a couple of old dishrags on his way to follow Roy.  “She was acting kind of weird when I got home.”

Roy has knelt down and commenced a slightly frantic petting around Hitomi’s head and neck, and Ed has to maneuver around him to get within mopping range of the dog vomit.  Al reaches out for one of the towels, either because he’s the best brother on the planet, or because he doesn’t think Ed will do a decent job of it.  Or a combination of both.  Probably both.

Ed hands him a rag.

“Oh,” Roy says into the horrible terrycloth-on-carpet-fiber noises harmonizing with the even more horrible squishing ones.  “Hell.  I’m sorry—let me—”

“Not a chance,” Ed and Al say in exquisite unison.

Roy rubs at Hitomi’s ears and makes a face that combines the cutest parts of guilt and penitence.  What an _asshole_.  “I—really.  It’s not your responsibility to cl—”

“You’d just put your fingers in it,” Ed says.

“And then Brother wouldn’t want them in places I prefer not to think about,” Al says.

Ed stops, stares, and—after some effort—musters a faint wheezing noise that doesn’t really convey the expansive string of expletives he was going for.

“I meant your mouth,” Al says.  “Although probably all of… you know, I’m going to… stop talking.  And clean.”

Roy goes for the roguish grin, but it’s a pale impersonation of the usual magnum opus.  “Must you?  I rather liked the direction that was going.”

“Hey,” Ed manages before they veer in that direction again and blow all the circuits in his brain for good.  “You—really ought to take her to the vet first thing tomorrow.  Just in case.”

The silent, subtle war in Roy’s expression makes it evident that he’s thinking the same things Ed is.  Is there a word for that?  The emotional solidarity you cultivate on accident with somebody over time?

Ed doesn’t have to say any of the other shit—doesn’t have to say _We all love this giant fuzzball, and even if we didn’t, you need her.  Your agency relies on her being healthy and alert and aware.  She can’t help you if she’s sick, and you can’t do any of the things that matter to you without her help.  You can’t bring her to Ishval with you if there’s something wrong, and you couldn’t come without her._

“Yes,” Roy says.  “You’re right.”

“It’s just two days,” Ed says.

Roy smiles, but Ed’s known him far too long not to be able to see the weariness in it, and behind it, and beneath.  “It is.”

Ed has tried to coax enough unfortunate fluids out of carpeting over the years that he doesn’t really need to focus all of his attention on the task, but it’s better than dwelling on all of the things that could go wrong.  Roy can take care of himself.  He’s been doing it for years.  Sure, he’s not quite as dangerous as he used to be, but anyone who underestimates him is going to find out that he’s a long damn way yet from an easy target.  Hawkeye will watch out for him.  Al will know, in that psychic-intuitive-empathetic way he always does, that Ed’s concerned about it, and he’ll stay home for the next couple nights to make sure that Roy’s not here alone.  It’s really not a big deal.

Ed just—

Has so much to lose, now.  So much that’s concrete and assailable; so much that he can _see_ , directly in front of his face, and looking at the riches spread before him makes it so much easier to give in to the fear.

He never wanted to let himself have good things, before—having them taken away just hurt too fucking much.  But he fell into this without realizing what he was doing; his life filled up with happiness around him, and now…

Well, it’s one of those rare times in a man’s life when picking tiny bits of dog barf out of the carpet fibers is preferable to facing what’s on his mind.

Roy’s still stroking slightly desperately at Hitomi, who has rested her head on his knee and closed her eyes.  Even though she looks piqued as hell, it’s still abominably cute; he’s fixed his full attention on her, which involves subconsciously pulling his whole body in a little closer around her like he can protect her from the entire world.

“We should get her some water,” Al says without breaking his scrub-stride.  “She’s probably dehydrated.”

“Is that right, girl?” Roy asks her softly, ruffling the fur on either side of her face.  “Don’t you move.  You’re okay.”  He gently shifts her chin off of his leg and starts the knee maneuvering required to stand—feeling for and bracing himself on the edge of the living room table as he goes.

“You got it?” Ed asks, as casually as he can manage, because that’s the best way he’s found yet to articulate _Please let me help you if you need it, but I don’t want to make stupid assumptions about what you can and can’t do and impinge on your agency_.  That would take way too long to say every time, and he’d probably mix up some of the syllables anyway.

“Yes,” Roy says, finding his feet and starting for the kitchen at what an untrained observer would probably just guess is a leisurely pace, not one measured out to make sure he can navigate his path around furniture and doorframes.  “Thank you.”

Ed wonders, sometimes, how they went from snark and snarling to all of this gentle sincerity shit.  It’s not that sarcasm isn’t still the native and national language in this house—there would be some hasty emigration if that wasn’t the case.  But it’s always founded on all of this… niceness.  And Ed’s periodically surprised to notice how much he _likes_ that.  How comfortable it is, when you let yourself get acclimated.

To hell with questioning it, though.  When you look gift horses in the mouth is when they start biting, and most mustangs aren’t as careful and deliberate and maddeningly sexy about it as Roy.

…Ed’s going to have to hold that thought—under lock, key, and several layers of lead—until another time.  Sometime when he’s got a couple hours to burn with the heat of it.  Sometime Al is not in the room, or the house, or possibly even the neighborhood.  Could get… noisy.

Before Ed’s stupid brain dissolves into denser mush and ceases to operate altogether, Roy stages a triumphant return with one of Hitomi’s little metal water bowls held in both hands.  Ed bites his tongue on the impulse to offer help again; Roy will ask if he needs it.  His balance is still as good as ever, or at the very least he can fake as much grace as he ever had before.  Nothing’s sloshing over the sides, and he doesn’t even look nervous about it, not that that stops Ed from watching his every step and swallowing a wince when he reaches the threshold that divides the kitchen linoleum and the living room carpet.

Speaking of carpet, though, there was a job he was supposed to be doing here, and Roy hasn’t tumbled ass over teakettle just yet, and even if the balance shifted, it’s not like Ed would be able to get over there in time to make a difference.

Some shit you just have to let go of.

Even when it’s _hard_.

  


* * *

  


“Come on, girl,” Roy says when they’ve settled in bed.  Hitomi, who had been plodding over towards her little plush dog bed in the corner, tilts her head.  Somehow Roy always knows when she’s listening, although that could be based less in weirdo-mystical dog telepathy than just in a well-established recognition that she’s extremely attuned to him.  He starts patting the mattress in between his feet and Ed’s.  “Come on up,” he says.  “Just this once.  C’mon.”

“Colonel Hawkeye’s gonna kill you,” Ed says.

“She’ll say she will,” Roy says, ramping up the insistent patting, “but she and I both know that if Hayate was feeling badly, she’d do the same thing.”

Ed makes a face.  “Don’t you ever get tired of understanding people better than they understand themselves?”

“No,” Roy says.

Uncertainly, Hitomi edges towards the bed and hops up to plant her front paws on the foot of it.

“Tonight’s special,” Ed tells her.  He joins in the patting for good measure.  They’re a pair of fucking _dorks_ , and the worst part is, he knows he loves it.  “Come on, Hitomi.  Come.”

She makes a noise that is unmistakably reluctant before finally answering the summons and climbing up onto the bed.  This dog is too expressive by… not even half anymore.  Three-quarters.  Seven-ninths.

“That’s a good girl,” Roy says, softly, reaching out to her with both hands.  She pushes her face against his palms before she circles around gingerly, apparently unsure how to negotiate the weight of her paws on this strange new surface, and settles down in a big old dog-bun in between them.

“Oh, good,” Ed says.  “Your ass doesn’t hog enough of the bed as it is.  Gotta stick a dog in the middle.”

Roy’s grinning as he scratches behind Hitomi’s ears, the bastard.  “How would you like it if I kicked _you_ out of the bed when you weren’t feeling well?”

“I normally sleep in the bed,” Ed says.  “Save your fallacious comparisons for Parliament.”

The grin only widens.  “I’m afraid you’ve caught me.  Should I admit to the ulterior motive of trying to pin down the blankets with her bodyweight so that you can’t steal them all?”

“I wouldn’t steal them if you didn’t snore,” Ed says.

“You steal them while you’re asleep,” Roy says.  “I’ve been awake while you did it on several occasions, and the cadence of your breathing is the sleeping one.  If you were doing it deliberately, that would be another matter entirely, and I’d make you very, _very_ sorry.”

Ed looks at him.

Roy does not look back, obviously, but he does offer a terrible, awful, absolutely irredeemable mild little smile.

“You fucker,” Ed says.

“Hopefully,” Roy says.

“I’m going to sleep,” Ed says.  “I hope Hitomi drools on your face.”

“You do that, too, sometimes,” Roy says.

“Not on your _face_ ,” Ed says.

“Conceded,” Roy says, looking altogether a billion times too smug.  “Though I think that despite the factual flaws of the premise, the principle—”

“I’m leaving you,” Ed says.  He reaches out and rubs at the particularly soft bit of fur on the dog’s cheek.  “Hey, Hitomi, you seeing anyone?”

“Well, technically,” Roy says, “I haven’t been _seeing_ you in a long time, so—”

Ed can’t help it.  He tries.  He really tries to hold it in, but he just… laughs.  Hard and helpless, feeling it twining around his ribs like a stream of light.

“All right,” he says when he catches his breath.  “You’re funny.  Sometimes even on purpose.  I guess maybe I’ll keep you.”

“What a relief,” Roy says, rolling onto his side to level Ed with the full force of the smolder-stare, because bastard is as bastard does, apparently.  “I promise I’ll make it worth your while.”

Ed does his damnedest to glower back—not that Roy will know, but the intention counts for something.  “You’d better.”

Roy reaches out, and Ed stays as still as he can so that he’ll occupy the space Roy’s mental map says he does based on the sounds of his voice, the rustle of the sheets, and the slide of his hair against the pillow, probably.  He wouldn’t be surprised in the slightest if Roy uses his hair as a primary identifier; people always tended to be most excited about the color, but Roy’s affection for it seems to be completely undaunted by his inability to appreciate that part.

Roy’s fingertips graze his browbone first, and he squinches one eye shut just in case—but Roy knows the structure of his face by now; the pads of his fingertips glide down Ed’s cheek to his jaw and then settle beneath it as Roy leans in to kiss him.

Ed knew he was fucked the first time—the very first time, on the stupid floor of Roy’s stupid kitchen, with his heart banging in his throat like a hundred-thousand soldiers stamping their feet.  It’s not even the fact that Roy’s such a good damn kisser, although obviously that makes a difference.

It’s the focus—the single-minded attentiveness; the deliberate movement of every single muscle; the absolute disregard for anything else that might or could or ought to exist in that moment.  Roy kisses like there’s nothing else in the world—nothing else he wants; nothing else he wants to do.  He kisses like no other fragment of the universe could possibly matter as much as this, and none of them merit an iota of his interest until he’s finished here.  He kisses like he’s got nothing but time and saliva, and he wants to give the full wealth of both of them to Ed—like he wants to give Ed everything he’s _got_.

And that’s kind of… true, isn’t it?  And kind of the point.  And kind of why kissing him back has not ceased to be terrifying and transcendent and dizzyingly warm even over the course of all these years.

Roy strokes Ed’s hair back from his forehead when they part to breathe a little bit.  Hitomi’s eyeing Roy’s elbow like she expects him to jab her in the butt with it, which might very well be a valid concern.

“One last try before I give up,” Roy says.  “Is everything all right?  You were… thoughtful, earlier.”

Ed could say a lot of sardonic shit, but if he can’t be real with Roy by now, then… well, he can, is the point.  And he should, probably, even when it’s difficult.

“Yeah,” he says.  “I dunno, really, it… one of those times when you’re not sure why something hits you quite like it does, I guess.  I was just sort of thinking about the trip, and then about how much has changed, and… it’s not that I don’t _like_ it—I do.  I love it.  All this—” He waves his hand in an ambient sort of way.  “All of it’s great.  And I’m happy.  But there’s this…”

Roy smiles, softly.  “Part of you that always feels a little bit like you’re falling off a cliff?”

Ed wrinkles his nose.  “Get outta my head, Mustang.”

“You and I both know I’d rather be in elsewhere,” Roy says, perfectly calmly.  He ignores the way Ed chokes violently on his own spit in favor of adding, “It’s… it never gets any easier.  But you find people who make it a little bit less impossible.”

Ed curls his fingers in the front of the soft old T-shirt Roy sleeps in.  “Yeah.”

Roy’s fingers card through his hair a few more times, drawing it back over the pillow and smoothing it down.

“I’ve always got you,” Roy says.  “No matter how far down it is; no matter how bad it looks—”

“Not like you’d know,” Ed says, but the fact that he buries his face in Roy’s chest while he says it probably tells a different story, and Roy’s damn good at listening by now.

“I can imagine,” Roy says.  His arm wraps around Ed’s shoulders, and his fingers creep up into Ed’s hair again and twist themselves into the thickest part of it.  “You don’t have to go.”

“It’s not the trip,” Ed says.  It’s the truth, which he has a tendency to stumble on at inconvenient moments.  “Just… everything.”

“I know,” Roy says.

Ed startles halfway out of his own skin when he feels something extremely warm and extremely wet on his forearm, but a glance up confirms that it’s Hitomi’s tongue, not Roy’s.

“Your dog thinks I’m dessert,” Ed says.  “It’s not my fault you didn’t get dinner, Fuzzface; I _tried_.”

Hitomi looks extremely offended that he just rebuffed her attempts at affection.

“She’s not trying to eat you,” Roy says.  “She just loves you.”  Ed tries to squirm away, but too late—the nuzzling starts in earnest, and Roy’s got both leverage and a grip, so he’s well and truly fucking trapped.  “As so many of us do.”

“Gross,” Ed manages.  “I can’t believe you suckered me into this.”

“I’m so terribly sorry,” Roy says, in the tone he favors when he wants to convey absolutely no apology whatsoever and include a touch of amusement at the fact that you were ever expecting any.  “You were tricked.  Deceived.  Bamboozled.  Blindsided, you might say.  Shortcha—”

“Speaking of traps,” Ed says, “shut yours and go to sleep, asshole.”

“How I adore your poignant endearments,” Roy says, but he’s back to stroking Ed’s hair.  “Your train’s early tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Earlier than the vet’s open, I think, so you can come and wave your handkerchief when I leave, if you want.”

“I will,” Roy says.  “Avidly.  I’ll get out one of the good silk ones.  I may be persuaded to weep a little.”

“I can’t believe people think _I’m_ the wiseass piece of shit around here,” Ed says.

“They don’t even know the meaning of the phrase,” Roy says.  “But—all right.  Point taken.”  His fingertips dance up Ed’s cheek again, maybe more as a matter of habit this time than to give him a spatial reference.  He shifts in and kisses Ed’s forehead, extends a hand for Hitomi to raise her head against, and then he settles down with his pillow, looking like an extremely ironic vision.

The universe is strange.  The universe is strange, and life is inexplicable, and sometimes things go very, very right even when the laws of the world as you know it shouldn’t allow for that.

“Goodnight, my dear,” Roy says.

“G’night, Roy,” Ed says, and he knows he doesn’t have to say the rest of it, because he established it past a shadow of a doubt a long time ago.

So that’s nice, too.

  


* * *

  


Less-nice is dragging yourself out of bed at the ass-crack of dawn so that you can take a long, long train ride directly into the desert.

Hitomi looks up, startled, when the alarm rings, and then buries her face among her paws again, keeping one eye cracked open so that she can give Ed the most judgmental stare ever levied by a dog who knows that today is supposed to be sleep-in day.

“Sorry,” Ed says.

She whuffs out a noise that might be an acceptance of the apology, and might be further judgment.  Ed’s got to get his miserable body into the shower either way, but he gives her a quick head-pat on his way to the dresser for good measure.

“You know what’s a crime?” Roy mumbles as Ed’s digging for clothes, wondering why he didn’t pick out some desert-worthy shit last night, when there was a light on, and he wasn’t bleary-brained in the extreme.  “I have _never_ seen your naked ass.  Can you believe that?  Not once.  This is ludicrous.  You can spend three decades laboring slowly upwards until you finally reach the peak of an entire social structure and still fail to meet the most important goal humanity’s ever mustered.”

“Were you dreaming about my ass?” Ed asks.  Nothing in his wardrobe really matches anyway, so he supposes nobody will be particularly scandalized if he just picks a few currently-grayish-looking things and throws them all together.  Well—Al might.  But Al won’t be coming with him, so it’ll only be a temporary scandalization.

“Yes,” Roy says, rolling over onto his back and releasing an enormous sigh.  “In detail.  And color.  Can I outlaw it?  I’m not sure what we’d _do_ , but I think it needs a decree.  This is definitely decree-worthy.  On the nice letterhead.”

“I’ll call Colonel Hawkeye later and let her know,” Ed says.

“Thank you,” Roy says, draping an arm over his face.  “I couldn’t possibly run the country today; I’m much too distraught.”

“Poor baby,” Ed says.

“That’s Führer Poor Baby to you,” Roy says.

Ed has to bite down very hard on his bottom lip to keep himself from laughing.  “Oh, yeah, of course.  Sorry, sir.  You gonna be ready to come and have some coffee for breakfast with me in a minute, Führer Poor Baby?”

“It’s also illegal that I can’t see you with wet hair,” Roy says.  “Verboten from this moment forward.”

“Tyranny’s back,” Ed says.  “Good thing it’s hot this time.  I’ll come tickle your feet after my shower.  Check on your dog.”

“I love you,” Roy says.  “Even though I can’t see your ass.”

“Go back to sleep,” Ed says, because that doesn’t stick in his throat quite as much as the alternative.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @me, why is it that you can make 1,000 background OCs for any given fanfic at the drop of a hat, but you never write anything original because you can't get invested in your own characters? :'|

“Crap,” Ed says, and then “ _Crap_ ,” with much more vigor, as he bangs his right knee on the car door trying to tumble himself out.  He can see the damn train on the platform, but he still has to pick up his ticket at the window and get both his ass and his luggage on board— “I’m gonna miss—”

“No,” Roy says, “you’re not.”

Ed attempts to clutch at his knee and manhandle his suitcase out of the car at the same time, which is a masterful feat of coordination that it’s a pity Roy will never appreciate.  “Is that a bet?  For, say, the cost of my damn ticket?  You’re on.”

“They thought I was going to be joining you on that train,” Roy says, crossing one leg over the other with the most overstated leisure Ed has ever seen in his life—which is really saying something, between this power-tripping bastard and the one he knows in Xing.  “As far as the passenger roster is concerned, I still am.  I very, very much doubt they’ll leave you.”

Ed sags against the side of the car.  It’s too early for this shit.  It’s always too early for this shit, but especially right now.  “Fuck.  I forgot.  You know the only thing worse than missing my train?”

“Living with a head of state?” Roy asks, but at least he’s finally dragging his ass out of the damn seat.

“No,” Ed says.  “Drowning in journalists.”

“They do often resemble a liquid,” Roy says.  He straightens, and then he stretches, and Hitomi looks up at him with the mournful-dog eyes, because she’s been instructed to stay in the car.  “Expanding to fill any container they’re allotted.”

“Tough break, boss,” Havoc says from the front seat, covering a yawn.  “You want some backup?”

“Yes,” Ed says.  “Just let your hand range suggestively over your gun a little bit or something.”

“Am I allowed to do that?” Havoc asks.  “I feel like I’d be impinging on Colonel Hawkeye’s trademark.”

“She might sue,” Roy says.  “Why don’t you stay with Hitomi?”

“Great idea, Chief,” Havoc says.  “That’s _almost_ as good as being at home in bed on a Saturday morning, cuddling with Becky-Bear.”

Ed is instants away from giving him the finger, but—journalists.

Time to face the music anyway, because Roy’s out of the car, and so’s Ed’s luggage, and Hitomi’s pouting but doesn’t look like she’s about to throw up all over the leather upholstery, so it’s probably safe to leave her for a minute.

Roy settles his hand on the small of Ed’s back, which serves two equally awesome purposes: it calms Ed’s nerves so immediately that he’d be embarrassed if he didn’t feel so damn warm-and-fuzzy; and it sets Ed up to lead them over to the train platform in a way that looks naturally affectionate instead of like some version of the sighted boyfriend dragging the blind one by the wrist.

They only get about three steps through the iron archway onto the platform before the hordes descend.

“Führer Mustang!” the one elbowing his way to the front says, barely holding onto his hat.  “Can you comment on your business in Ishval?”

“I _can_ ,” Roy says.

The reporter waits.

Roy smiles.

Ed clears his throat loudly so that he won’t laugh.

Roy gives it another long second, and somehow his freaky psychic powers alert him to the exact right moment to continue speaking—right after the reporter’s opened his mouth, but before he’s made a sound.

“The business in question has been delayed in any case,” Roy says.  “I was looking forward to the visit, and I’m hopeful that my friends and colleagues in the East will understand.”

“Führer Mustang,” a woman cuts in, “is it true that you’re planning to unseat the provincial governor, who is an Amestrian citizen?”

“‘Unseat’ is an extremely unpleasant word,” Roy says, “for a process which would—if I was considering it, which I am _not_ confirming, mind you—only take place with the cooperation of all involved, ensuring that everyone’s voice was heard, and all of the affected parties’ needs were met.  Although—”  She starts a follow-up, and he raises his voice, and his placid little smile sharpens at the edges.  Ed gets goosebumps.  “ _Although_ ,” Roy says, “you might wish to remember that, as of a bill passed several years ago, all Ishvalans are Amestrian citizens.  If your concern is about race, rather than military presence and peacekeeping, you may need to rephrase your question.”

Ed reaches up to pat Roy’s shoulder to indicate that he’s going to have to split off for a second.  “Hey,” he says to the flock, “could you guys move so I can go get my ticket?”

“You _are_ heading to Ishval, Mr. Elric, without the Führer in attendance?” someone asks.

“Nah,” Ed says.  “I just really like hanging out at train stations and buying tickets for fun.  They’re great.  I get to see all you guys and get asked all kinds of stupid stuff and make everybody else on the train really late.”

“You’ll have to forgive Mr. Elric,” Roy says.  “He hasn’t had any coffee.”

“One of you leeches want to make yourselves useful and help with that?” Ed asks.

“Please don’t quote him on that,” Roy says.  “I’ll get you a coffee, love; just go get your ti—”

Great.  Blood in the water.  At least Ed’s… completely statistically ordinary height makes it easy to duck under a few arms and escape the cluster of carnivores.  The train’s chuffing idly, and a glance at the little clock tower confirms it’s not _too_ late yet—or at least not any later than the trains around here usually leave.  He’s been meaning to tell Roy to deal with that problem, but it tends to work out in his favor, so maybe he’ll shelve that particular complaint for a while.

The guy at the ticket window is staring openly at the seething mass of humanity as Ed storms over.

“Is it always like that?” the ticket guy asks, with no small amount of awe.

“Nah,” Ed says, leaning on the counter and working up to a pretty good glare in the direction of the scum.  “There’s usually not more than one or two in any given place if they don’t know in advance you’re gonna be there.”

The guy’s making a face that encapsulates a significant amount of horror.  “Do they just… follow you around?”

“Sometimes,” Ed says.

“Jeez,” the guy says.

“You’re tellin’ me,” Ed says.

“Gosh,” the guy says.  He sounds like Al.  “Oh, um—here’re your tickets.  I think they’re due to leave pretty soon, but…”

“Thanks,” Ed says, taking the proffered slips of paper that more or less started this whole mess, albeit inevitably.  He starts to turn away and half-wave.  “Appreciate your h…” He stalls mid-swivel-step, which the automail really doesn’t like.  “Wait—these say first class.  We didn’t buy first class.”  He pauses.  “Did we?”

“Oh,” the guy says, having the grace to look chagrined.  “Um, no.  Just—you know—”

Ed tries to limit himself to a grimace unaccompanied by any of his favorite words.  “You upgrade the Führer no matter what he pays for, because of course you do?”

“Uh,” the guy says, wincing a little.  “Y… eah.”

Ed lifts the top ticket just to confirm that they’re both travesties.  Apparently it’s not just Roy who gets uninvited kickbacks at the train station.  “Well, he’s not even coming.  It’s just me.  So can you downgrade it?”

“What?” the guy says.

Ed holds out his ticket.  “Can you change it back to coach?”

The wince deepens and intensifies.  “Um—I don’t—we can’t, really; it’s… I mean, I guess I could reprint it, but—”

“But they’re already waiting on us,” Ed says.  “Fine.  Are you sold out?  I’ll just—sit in coach anyway.”

The guy blinks at him.

Ed rattles the ticket paper a little like that’ll help elucidate.  “It’s the principle of the thing.”

“Okay,” the guy says.  “That’s…”

“Never mind,” Ed says.  “Thanks; have a good day.”

The guy calls a reciprocation after him, but he’s already off across the platform, squaring his shoulders to brace himself for the dive back into the fray.  He has to use his elbows a little bit to work his way through the little crowd to get to Roy, but his arms aren’t nearly as dangerous now that the right one doesn’t leave bruises when you apply the slightest amount of force, so he’s not too worried about assault and battery charges yet.

“—industry is an extremely worthwhile endeavor,” Roy is saying as Ed forges his way into earshot, “but it, like everything, will be much more efficient if we make improvements to infrastructure _first_.  Consider how much easier it is to drive your supply truck on a well-paved road—or how much more cost-effective your supplies will be if they’re sustainably sourced and reliably delivered.”  That sounds like a nice end to a pull-quote, so Ed reaches out to catch Roy’s shoulder.  “Oh,” Roy says, turning in his direction and smiling _instantly_ , “hello.”

Was it a lucky guess, or does he recognize the precise pressure of Ed’s touch well enough to distinguish it from any given stranger’s?

“Hey,” Ed says.  “Here’s the train ticket you’re not going to use.”

“Thank you,” Roy says, raising his hand.  Ed touches the edge to his palm so he can close his fingers around it.  “Are you ready to go?”

Ed left his suitcase next to Roy’s feet, since he didn’t figure the bastard was going to move much.  He picks it up.  “Yeah.  They tried to put us in first-class, so I’m considerin’ hanging off the back.  Just for old times’ sake.”

“That would be very proletarian of you,” Roy says.

It will never be any less super fucking weird to have cutesy little conversations like this while surrounded by bug-eyed journalists with their cameras and their notepads and their clever, twisty lies all at the ready.

“You know me,” Ed says.  “Proletarian’s what I aspire to.  What the hell does that even mean?”

“You are and always will be a man of the people,” Roy says.

“Well, yeah,” Ed says.  “Last time I checked, I _was_ a person, though if you’ve got some secret government intel on that, you might wanna give me an update.”

Someone’s going to put into a story that he just admitted to being an alien from another universe, and Sheska’s going to lose her shit.

Roy, however, is laughing, though whether at what Ed said or at the prospect of the libel, Ed has no idea.  He does know that he likes the way Roy’s arm settles around his shoulder and nudges him forward just a little to start them towards the train itself.  It feels really… nice.  Really comfortable.

The sea of reporters parts just enough to let them pass, which Ed likes a hell of a lot less, but at least they’re finally making some progress here.  He tows Roy over to the last car and slows his stride so that Roy will know to stop with him.

Roy knows, all right.  And then he does that terrible, horrible, awful thing where he smiles as softly as any human being’s ever been capable of, tilts his head a little, cups Ed’s face in both hands, closes his eyes, and leans in until their foreheads touch.

The eyes closed thing is a nice detail considering that it’s irrelevant, but Ed’s never had the heart to mention it.

“Every day,” Roy says, softly, in the private voice he usually saves for when they’re entirely alone, “the privilege of your company reminds me what a mediocre life I could have lived without you.”  He smiles.  “Thank you for saving me from that.  And from myself—over and over, every other minute, more or less.  Thank you for letting me in, and letting me be a part of—”

“Shut up,” Ed says—which is better than getting emotional on a train platform where journalists lurk around every single corner.  “Did you practice that?  Why the big farewell speech?  Do you think I’m gonna die on this trip or something?”

Roy opens his eyes to maximize the sardonic impact of his expression, whether or not he can meet Ed’s gaze with it.  “ _No_.  Heaven forbid.”  He cracks a smile again.  That’s the kind of helplessness Ed likes on him, more than it’s safe to admit.  “It’s just that some things are worth saying even if—perhaps especially if—they seem obvious or redundant.”  He strokes his thumb down Ed’s cheek and then runs it back and forth along Ed’s jaw, and it’s all Ed can do not to let his damn traitor eyelids flutter.  “I want you to be able to take that with you—that sentiment.  Soppy or not.”

“Soppy,” Ed croaks out.  “Definitely.”

“What a terrible shame,” Roy says.  “So much for my precious street cred.”

The leader of their country is a dweeb, and he’s _Ed’s_ dweeb, and life is inexplicable; and Ed would never, ever trade this one back.

That’s something.  That’s a lot.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “I lose sleep every night worrying about your street cred.  You should probably work on that.”

Roy starts grinning, attempts to stop, and does not succeed.  “Does it help that I have the hottest boyfriend in the country?  I feel like I should get some points somewhere for that, although I’m not sure if they fall into the ‘street cred’ column in particular.  Maybe the ‘dumb luck’ one.”

“Oh, come on,” Ed says.  “ _Blind_ luck, obviously.”

“Mmm,” Roy says.  “Puns make you even more attractive.”

“There’s something wrong with us,” Ed says.

“Yes,” Roy says, “there is.  And it’s beautiful.”

Back to the thumb-stroking.  Speaking of street cred, Ed wishes he could hate all the gooey face-petting shit, but he’s tried, and he can’t.

“Edward,” Roy says.  Damn it; full-naming is never a good sign; it usually means he’s about to get all sincere and— “Please never, ever change.”

“Eugh,” Ed says.

Roy’s grin widens.

“Well,” Ed says.  “Y’know.  Likewise.  Or whatever.  Don’t you have a country to go run?”

“It’s the weekend,” Roy says.  “I have a dog to fuss over, and then a nap to take.”

“And then you’re gonna work at home until Al kicks you out for scheming too loud,” Ed says.

“Precisely,” Roy says.  “Will you call me when you get in?”

“I might forget,” Ed says, which is the honest truth.  “But I left Al the number of the inn, so if I do, you can ask ’em, and they should know if they’ve seen me come in clamoring for coffee yet or not.”

“Delightful,” Roy says.

“I should really go,” Ed says.  “All the people on this train fuckin’ hate me right now.”

“No, they don’t,” Roy says.  “The majority of them are jealous of one of the two of us, and the remainder’s miserable opinions don’t count anyway.”

Ed pokes a finger at Roy’s chest—he’s not entirely sure what he intends to accomplish in so doing, but it seems like the right idea to his caffeine-starved brain, so he follows through—and then leans in for the hug.  “Still oughta go.”

“All right,” Roy says.  “If anyone tells you they’re your number one fan, tell them I have seniority _and_ precedence.”

“Smarmy piece of shit,” Ed says.

Roy draws back, shepherds his chin gently with two fingertips, and kisses him.

One of the journalists gasps loud enough for Ed to hear over the roar of his blood in his ears.

It’s nothing nearly as dirty or as thorough or as intense as Roy’s usual habit—no tongue, for starters; no exploratory hands roving towards Ed’s much-discussed posterior, for another—but it’s so _good_.  They always are.

Only they’ve never made out in public before, and _saying_ it’s one thing, but providing incontrovertible evidence to the dozen greedy flashbulbs and their hungry owners is another thing, and Ed just never wants to be the thing that holds Roy back or brings him down or—

“Was that really necessary?” he manages.

“Yes,” Roy says.  “I miss you already.  And besides—they got up very early; the least we can do is reward them for their diligence.”

“You’re sick,” Ed says.

“Probably,” Roy says.  He kisses Ed’s forehead.  “Travel safe, love.”

“Eew,” Ed says.  “Spoil Hitomi a little bit for me.  Love you, asshole.”

He ducks his head and turns and starts for the steps up to the train before Roy can respond, but hopefully he said that quietly enough that none of the vultures caught the words.

The other advantage of early trains is that there aren’t a whole shit-ton of people on them, at least compared to reasonable hours, so the last car is mostly empty seats.  Ed picks a clear pair of opposing benches, drops down onto the one that faces away from the direction the train’s about to go, and puts his feet up on the other one.  Out the window he can see Roy royalty-waving as he tries to make his way through the journalists back to the car.  Havoc gets out and waves back at him cheerily.

But then the steam thickens, and the wheels screech against the rails as they start to move—

And it’s only a matter of seconds before the angle changes, and the walls of the station buildings swallow Roy and everything else besides; and then it’s dwindling into the distance; and then… gone.

A girl wearing one of those tweed hats with the slanted top and the short brim moves over with the apparent intention of dropping down onto the seat across from Ed.  She notices that his feet are occupying it, pauses, and then perches on the edge of the seat on the other side of the aisle.  She sees him watching her warily and beams back.

Then she whips out a tiny notebook with spiral binding at the top, and a pencil nearing the end of its useful life.

“Mr. Elric?” she says.

Ed bites his tongue very, very hard on _“Fuck”_.

“That’s me,” he says instead.  Roy owes him one.  Roy owes him two.  Roy owes him a billion, and a blow job.

“Can I ask you a couple of questions?” she says.

This time, it’s _“Can I fucking stop you?”_ that he has to choke down.

“Don’t you people have anything better to do?” he manages instead.

She twirls her pencil around and gives him a faintly embarrassed grin.  “It’s been… a slow news week.”

At least if he has to get stalked to the ends of the planet by a journalist, he managed to find the solitary honest one.

“I’m not gonna be a whole lot of help there,” he says.  “The worst thing I have seen Roy do in the past five years is give my share of the bacon to his dog.  Which was totally not in retaliation for something I did, and was definitely not deserved.  Make sure you write that part down.”  He pauses.  “Actually, wait—don’t write any of that down, because Colonel Hawkeye’ll kill him, and then we’ll be back to square one with this whole governing-the-country thing.”

She’s sitting very still, pencil poised over the paper, eyes enormous.  She hasn’t written a thing.

Hopefully Roy will appreciate that Ed just saved his life.  Admittedly, it was from a danger that Ed himself presented, but… still counts.  Right?

“Look,” he says.  “I’m just trying to get to Ishval in one piece here, and I haven’t had any coffee because I was too slow getting my ass out of the shower this morning, and the dog’s sick, and everything’s kind of a mess, so—is there anything in particular you wanna know?”

“Um,” she says.  “Yeah.  Now that you mention it—how does it all affect you?”

It’s his turn to stare blankly for a little bit.  “How does what affect me?”

“Being in a long-term relationship with the Führer of Amestris,” she says, and _boy_ , do those words sound a thousand times weirder coming out of somebody else’s mouth.

“I dunno,” he says, because it’s the truth.  “It’s just… normal.  I mean—obviously it’s not normal, but it’s normal _ized_.  We’ve normalized it.  Al’n I haven’t had normal lives since we were seven and eight—never have if you wanna get real technical about it, but that’s a different problem that involves really jacked up history lessons and stuff—and it was… I mean… you get close to somebody, and your habits get all mixed up with theirs, and you let ’em in, and they let you in, and then you wake up one morning, and it’s all just… life.  It’s your life.  And you get used to it.  And then over time, Roy’s life ended up where it is now, but it’d always been going in that direction, so it was a little surreal at first, but none of it was… strange, or anything, I guess.  It was all just sort of following the course of how things were always gonna be.  Me being part of it happened a long time ago, and we just kind of rode it out together.  All three of us, really.  I think the press is underutilizing Al, but I’m glad about that; I don’t want him getting harassed out there and shit.  It’s not his fault I was dumb enough to shack up with the likes of Mustang, even if he would probably enjoy getting to toy with a journalist once in a while.”

She’s scribbling wildly this time.  Shit.  Fuck.  Damn.  Hell.  There are other words he’d like to add to his mental assessment of this situation, but the caffeine deprivation is holding them out of his reach.

Not that his reach is…

_Damn_ it.

“What about politically?” she asks.  “Where do you stand on the issues?  Have you ever had to bite your tongue when he did something you didn’t agree with, or…?”

“That’s a…” What’s the thing Roy calls them?  “…leading question.”

She winces.  Not so bad, this one.  “Kind of.  Yeah.  Sorry.”

“Doesn’t matter,” he says.  “Because the answer is, ‘If you think I’d ever hesitate to give Roy Mustang a piece of my mind, you must not ever have met either of us’.”

The wince transitions into a tentative grin.  “Well—before today, never in person.  I guess I still haven’t met the Führer, really; I just sort of… listened in.”

“He loves that shit,” Ed says.  “Don’t ever let him tell you that he doesn’t.  Attention turns him into a giant pufferfish.”

Her grin gains both strength and sincerity.  “Yeah?”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “A noble, handsome pufferfish deeply invested in the good of the country and its people, probably.”

“But of course,” she says.  She pauses—he can tell, even though the pencil’s still moving for another second before she looks up.  “You… sorry if this sounds—I don’t know, presumptuous or something—”  Ed has no idea how she just generated that word this early in the day.  “—but it seems like you… knew.  That this was going to happen.  That he was going to end up where he is.”

Stupid trains.  Stupid train first thing in the damn morning.  Conversation feels more natural in a train car, with the ambient rattling all around and a shadow not unlike Al’s on the wall, with one of Ed’s feet kicked up on the seat opposite and his brain unraveling without the caffeine to cinch it in.  And she’s nice.  And he’s still a little bit high off of Roy’s kiss, and Roy’s breath, and Roy’s words.

“Not exactly that he’d get here,” Ed says.  “But I always knew he’d get somewhere—a long way.  And a long way from where he started.  Even before I knew how deep it went, I knew—he was one of those people who’s trying to _do_ something, you know?  That drive is at the core of him in some way.  I mean… everybody does shitty things—and for some people, those are orders of magnitude shittier than for others, but… that’s life.  That’s people.  Human beings fuck up; it’s what we do.  And what you do next _matters_.  You can’t change it.  You can’t fix it.  You can’t unmake it.  But you can make it better.  You can build on what you’ve got.  And that’s part of who he is.  I knew it was going to lead him someplace; I just didn’t know where it’d be, and by the time either of us figured that out, I was already along for the ride, I guess.”

Roy would nudge him gently, raise an eyebrow, and mouth _The ride?_

Bastard’s obnoxiously flirty even when he’s not physically here.

The journalist girl glances up from writing to give him a beatific little smile.  It takes him a second to register that it’s probably because of what he said, not because of what Roy added in his head.

“Is it hard, though?” she asks, which is not helping at all.  “Supporting someone who’s… at the top, I guess.  High-powered.  Really motivated like that.”

“Not really,” Ed says.  “I’m the same way, and he always had my back when I was hell-bent on doing what I had to do or dying in the attempt.  And I’m still like that, except the stakes are a lot lower with the work I do now, so… I guess we take care of each other.  As much as we can.  That’s all it really is.”

She’s smiling again—a smile like she just heard her favorite song in the distance, or something happened to strangers on the street that reminded her of something funny.

He gives it a second, but the expression lingers, so then he says, “What’s that for?”

It’s gone.  She blinks at him repeatedly instead.  “What’s what for?”

“The…” He gestures, in vague circles, around his own face.  “You had a… you were doing a… thing.”

She blinks a little more, not that that probably helps.  “…smiling?”

Of course it sounds stupid when she says it like that.  “Uh… yeah.  I guess.”

“Oh,” she says.  “Well—it’s just… I never really thought about… what would’ve brought you two together—and kept you together through all of it.  It’s really interesting.  And really… sweet.”

“Gross,” Ed says.  “Please don’t publish anything like that.  He’ll gloat for _days_.”

Back to the blinking.

“I mean,” Ed says, maybe a touch hastily, “not in a _bad_ way.  Just…” His gaze drifts down to her notebook, and he starts, in feverish detail, to plan the different ways he could steal it from her and burn it so that none of this ever makes it into print.  “…because… he’s… a hopeless fucking romantic and always has been.  I’m not helping.  _Shit_.”

“Depends on your definition of ‘helping’,” she says.

“I can’t stand you lot,” Ed says.  “Bunch of bloodthirsty word buzzards.  How’d a nice kid like you get into this stupid business anyway?”

Turns out, the only thing journalists like more than asking stupid questions is talking about themselves.

He has to give this one—and she has a name, as it turns out; it’s Keira O’Hannon—some credit: she is, as it turns out, a pretty great storyteller.  The unraveling of the yarn takes them almost all the way to the stop in East City.  Ed is surprised to find himself not especially bored as she explains her humble upbringings in the west and how she always wanted to be a novelist, but her schoolteachers told her she was writing pulp—and then how she had to find a job in a hurry when her father got sick, and she wound up tying up stacks of newspapers with twine for the paper boys to fit into their bike baskets and distribute around West City.  From there, she clambered up the press ladder to editing op-eds, and then conducting interviews, and then writing travel feature pieces, and eventually someone recognized that she could turn a phrase well enough to start siccing her on the general populace in Central—but she always had her eye on the Führer, and she always thought it was strange how few people tried to approach him through Ed.

“Probably they tried it once,” Ed says.  “And once was enough.  Or they remember me from the good old days, when there was a pretty good likelihood that any given building in the vicinity was gonna blow up if you hung around me long enough, so you had to report from a safe distance.”

Keira is smart enough to hesitate.  “That is… all in the past tense, right?”

He’s awake enough now to flash her the wolf grin.  “Maybe.  Maybe not.”

She grimaces.  “Good to know.”

The whistle screeches—two long blows and a short one, which means they’re approaching the station.  Not that Ed’s spent way too goddamn substantial a portion of his life learning the minutiae of the Amestrian train system, or anything.

“All right,” he says, stretching.  “I gotta get off this damn thing and get some coffee, so you can lie in wait and think of more pointed questions until I come back.”

“Can’t I come and get coffee, too?” she asks.  “I don’t know if I can keep up with you otherwise.”

Great.  Now he’s going to be obligated to buy her one, and he won’t get his breather.  Plus he can’t call Roy, submit a not-especially-anonymous tip that Central’s printing ink supply has been poisoned, and suggest drastic measures like shutting down every newspaper office in the city until further notice.

“Don’t fall behind,” he says.  “Coffee waits for no one.”

“Yes, sir,” she says.

Ed really needs to kick the adoption habit.  This used to happen to him all the time back in the day—people would just sort of… meet him and Al, talk to them, and end up following them around while they did their shit.  Occasionally those people would write letters here and there after seeing them off at the train station, but usually they just sort of disappeared into the ether of their own lives afterward, never to cross paths with the Elrics again.

But Ed always thought it was _Al’s_ fault.  Al was the one who was constantly picking up kittens, after all; Ed assumed that spirit extended to people, and that was the thing that drew them in.  But apparently he’s at least got some of it—enough to have Keira trailing just a few paces behind as he starts for the steps down from the train car.  Somehow he has to figure out a way to divest himself of that… whatever it is; aura or aspect or—

There’s a guy with a gun approaching the first-class car at the far end of the platform.

There is a _guy_ with a _gun_ —

His two cronies bear knives instead of firearms, but they look beefy enough to cause a hell of a lot of trouble anyway.

The funny thing about instincts is that they’re built into your being somewhere—when he’s not thinking, and he’s not looking, Ed expects to feel things underneath the sole of his left foot; for years he’d reach out to test the heat or the consistency of an object with his fingertips and then realize that he’d held out the steel.  Brains hard-wire themselves, and changing the inputs takes years and years of concentrated effort and a deliberate re-training of muscles that know exactly what their movement used to mean.

Emotionally reactive instincts are like that, too.

Only dumber, in Ed’s case.

Edward Elric, aged twenty-odd and change, the ex-Fullmetal Alchemist, long-term lover of the Führer of Amestris and the doting elder brother of the smartest up-and-coming alchemical scientist of the modern age, with a journalist at his heels…

Sees a man with a gun, stops in his tracks, squares his shoulders, curls his fists, and shouts, “ _Hey, fuckface_!”

They were moving towards the first-class car.  Is it possible—

It doesn’t matter what’s possible; what he’s got is three would-be killers turning not-so-slowly at his less-than-genial address.

Not-so-slowly is fine.  Ed isn’t too old for this shit just yet.

The key is to prevent the guy with a gun from getting a clear shot, which sounds great to Ed, because the easiest solution to that problem involves barreling right for the closer knifeman before he knows what’s hit him.

Momentarily, this shitheel will figure out that what hit him is Ed’s right shoulder, though unfortunately the joint in question generally only knocks the wind out of people these days instead of fracturing a rib or two for good measure.  Even adrenaline has a hell of a lot of trouble smothering that kind of pain—used to be damn useful to be able to deal it with the first blow of the fight.

Ed’s victim musters a faint wheeze before Ed grinds his heels into the pavement to shift his own balance, then shoves this asshole bodily towards the gunman—that’s both of them sorted for the next fifteen seconds or so—

He swivels smoothly, keeping his weight low and his knees bent; his heart bangs in his ears hard enough that he can’t hear the second knifeman panting, though he can see the rapid rise and fall of the bastard’s chest.

Ed always thinks weird shit in the heat of the moment.  Right now, he’s wondering what the fuck kind of mediocre mastermind would be stupid enough to send incompetent assassins after the _Flame Alchemist_ , whether or not the country’s premiere powerhouse State Alchemist, who is literally famous for incinerating anything in his path, is blind these days.  Did they not hear about the Promised Day?  Do they not understand how flames work?  Do they not realize that Roy could just _light the entire platform on fire_ if it came to a choice between property damage and citizens’ lives?

Well.

Whatever.

Ed’s got places to go, people to see, and asses to kick, as per usual; he can speculate about bad wannabe assassins later on.

Especially because if he lets his brain flit outward too far just now, he’ll start to wonder if maybe they’re not as bad as they seem—if maybe there are more, and better, ones in other places.  Like his front fucking doorstep, fifteen feet away from where Roy lounges unsuspectingly on the couch with some stupid paperwork.

Right now he’s got to beat the shit out of three guys—well, two and a half, if the work he just did on the first one took—before he can contemplate any of that too deeply.

His current subject is waving the knife like he thinks that slashing the air is going to accomplish something, or perhaps intimidate someone who used to transmute his own forearm into a two-foot blade on a regular basis.  Ed’s probably got a grand total of twelve seconds left before the other two find their feet again, and the gunman starts to find his aim, so he’s going to have to make this quick.

Fortunately, he’s still got a few good tricks up his sleeve.

Or up his pants leg, as it were, since what he’s specifically referring to is the extremely solid metal foot that he applies with immense force to the wrist of the hand that holds the knife—which is unexpected in a variety of ways, and which results in two satisfying sounds: a loud _crack_ of bone damage, if not breakage; and a high-pitched howl of startled agony.

The knife pops up out of the offending hand like a slippery eel, and Ed snatches it out of the air in his left hand, twirls it once to get a feel for the weight of the blade, and then smacks the butt of the handle sharply against the side of the guy’s head.  He goes down like a sack of potatoes and stays down.

Ed turns—and turns his attention—to the second man with the knife, who stands slightly taller and broader than this one but looks every bit as flabbergasted at the quickness of the maneuvering Ed just did.  You’d think these assholes had never seen a mark fight back before.

The gunman starts to raise his arm, which decides matters pretty swiftly; Ed jumps a few bits of his planned timeline and dives right for the other knifeman, who staggers back, finds his balance, and then scrambles several more steps backwards, trying to stay out of Ed’s range.

Which works out perfectly, because Ed guides their combined trajectory back towards the cinderblock wall of the nearest station building.

He feints with the knife once—twice—he can almost _hear_ the leader with the gun weighing his options, trying to decide if Ed’s too small a target, thank you very fucking much, to hit without grazing his own underling.

Opponents who aren’t used to resistance are always a little unpredictable, because they don’t know how to use much of anything except brute force, and they panic when you push them.

Ed swipes once, deliberately wide, and lets the bastard lunge at him too fast and too violently to retaliate—which opens the idiot’s whole chest, which makes it a prime place for Ed to shove his trusty shoulder one more time—

On this particular adventure, they undertake a brief but meaningful journey directly at the wall—hurling Ed’s entire weight in with his adversary’s retreating step, which gives them plenty of combined momentum to slam the bastard back against the brick.

His head snaps back and makes contact with the wall, and that’s a sick noise, too, and Ed—heart in his throat, beating so hard he can feel it behind his eyes—hopes desperately that it wasn’t hard enough to kill him—

The asshole’s eyes roll back, and his grip goes limp, and the knife tumbles to the pavement.

But he’s still breathing.

So that counts.

Ed catches up the other knife in his free hand and twists, turning his weight on his right heel—the sensitivity makes a big damn difference as far as balance goes—to face the gunman.

“Well,” he says, and it comes out even lighter than he intended, because the breath is darting in and out of him quickly now.  “How d’you like these odds?”

The guy’s eyes narrow.  They both know there’s nothing and no one standing in the way—literally, figuratively, philosophically—of him putting a bullet through Ed’s skull now.

But now they both also know that Ed does not go down without one hell of a fucking fight.

The man swallows, and his chin shifts incrementally upward—that’s a decision-making tell, so Ed knows before it happens that the next movement will be him raising his right arm to level the pistol.  With six full paces between them, physics sides with the gun right now.

Ed’s learned another relevant thing over the years—cornered animals fight like demons.  The trick, when you have the upper hand, is to rile ’em up just enough to get their vital functions going, so the adrenaline and the headrush and the sound of their own heartbeat crack their concentration, and then press your advantage _just_ before their defense-aggression switch flips, and they come right for you.

…so maybe Ed kind of-sort of picked that one up from what Roy used to do to _him_.  Usually verbally.  Sometimes not.

For now, though, this guy’s finger is already curled around the trigger.  Ed can almost hear the chemicals flitting through them both, jacking up their heart-rates, singing through their veins—

They’re both trying to slow their breathing, eyes locked.  Ed swallows, sets his jaw, and flips the knife in his left hand without breaking eye contact—he needs the cold metal tip ready and waiting in his fingertips for the next bit.

Ed gives them another half a second to stare each other down, and then he flicks his eyes to the side—looking intently, for the tiniest instant, at the thin air beyond the guy’s left shoulder—before centering his gaze on the guy’s face again.  He pretends to fight a small, delighted smile.  And then he glances at the same place for another fraction of a second, and looks back.

Roy would have to drag it out of him with torture—or tickling, though maybe that’s redundant—but he’s been right about one thing for a long damn time: sometimes, subtlety works wonders.  Convincing people to think what you want without them realizing that you’re tugging at the strings gives you all kinds of powers Ed could never touch before.  He’s always been good at manipulating the physical world, both as far as people and as far as its basic damn components.  He’s figured out how to hammer away at people’s emotions here and there over the years, mostly on accident, and by analyzing their reactions after the fact.

But controlling what people _think_ —

The gunman draws a half-breath, hesitates, and then instinctively starts to turn towards the place Ed looked, searching for the imaginary backup that Ed just created in his brain.

Which gives Ed the perfect window to snap his wrist and throw the knife.

The blade buries itself in the gunman’s forearm—the heel of his hand seemed too risky a target; a centimeter off either way would’ve sent it rebounding off of the butt of the gun—

Ed lunges forward, then slings his weight away from his momentum, onto his right foot—and drops that knee and skids forward so that his left foot slides directly into the gunman’s ankles.

Bastard’s quick, though, already recovering from the fake-out and struggling to right himself—he topples to the ground, hissing through his teeth, narrowly misses landing right on top of Ed; but despite the spurt of blood and the impact, he hasn’t dropped the gun—

Which is, of course, why evolution and the universe gave humankind both knees and elbows—the former, to swivel-clamber up onto before your opponent’s gasped in another breath; the latter, to apply directly to his nose.

Al’s going to be pissed that there’s blood all over Ed’s new shirt—which is a little bit ridiculous, given that the dust and the sand are going to worm their way into every single fiber when he gets to Ishval anyway; what difference does a little hemoglobin make then?  At least Roy won’t be able to see it and freak out thinking that it’s Ed's.

Besides, it’s worth the sacrifice and would be worth half a dozen more like it—the asshole whose chest Ed is pinning with his metal knee finally, _finally_ lets the gun fall to the concrete.  He also wails and fumbles to hold his hand—the one not encumbered by a knife through the wrist—to his nose, but Ed’s much less invested in that part.

“So,” Ed says.  He’s a little sh… he’s slightly out of breath.  That’s what he is.  This damn sedentary domestic grownup life stuff will screw you that way.  “You want to talk to the cops, or you want to talk to me?”

The man glares, silently, with an intensity of venom that Ed can’t blame him for and kind of has to admire.

“I’m gonna be a whole lot nicer,” Ed says.  “But I think you know that.”

The glaring continues, wordless still.  One of the felled compatriots groans.  Ed shifts his weight so that he won’t just crush this asshole with his metal leg, and then uses the other one to kick the gun gently, sending it skittering further out of reach.

“Okay,” he says.  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”  He’s just glad the guy hasn’t spit in his face, considering the amount of blood he’d get in his eyes right now.  He doesn’t know where the hell that stuff’s been—or he does, but he doesn’t know what kind of bacteria and whatnot are swimming in it.  Criminal types don’t tend to have the cleanest sputum, demographically speaking.

He tries to keep half of his attention on his temporarily-subdued opponent as he glances around.  Keira’s not far off, slowly lowering her… camera.

Of course she is.

He tries to choke down the anger that flares up hot and stark and smoky, tightening his throat, burning the roof of his mouth and tainting his bloodstream with the ash.  Not now; he can’t afford to be pissed off now.  Not to the goddamn motherfucking press.

“Hey,” he says.  “You mind calling the police?  Y’know, when you get a second.”

“Oh,” she says, looking immensely embarrassed—so at least that’s something.  “I… sort of… I mean, I kinda asked the ticket window… or I shouted it; I dunno if he heard…”

He has to remember that she’s just trying to pay her bills.  He has to remember that if she did her homework, she probably knew he wouldn’t get his ass killed out there.  He has to remember that her standing there and documenting it instead of running for cover the instant she saw weapons gleaming takes a different kind of courage, and not everybody understands bravery the same way.  He has to remember that snarling loudest in a den of predators won’t change the fact that they’re all born carnivores.

He draws a couple of deep breaths and looks down at his generously red-spattered charge, and at his own nearly-as-generously red-spattered sleeve.  East City’s not too bad for response times, right?  Unless a lot’s changed.  Surely if _they_ thought the Führer was going to be on this damn train, they’d have some people posted nearby, just in case anything went awry—but if these guys got all the way onto the platform without resistance, does that mean that they took down some of the cavalry before they even got here?  What if—

_What if_ doesn’t help.  This is what he’s got—specifically, three groaning, injured would-be assassins, a train full of gawking civilians, and an extremely enterprising journalist.

“Can you ask at the window whether they’ve got rope or something?” he calls to Keira.  “If the cops’re gonna be a while, we’re—”

“Mr. Elric, I presume?” a very calm, very smooth male voice asks, and Ed shifts—planting his hand flat on the assassin’s chest for good measure; these guys can be slippery as shit if you turn your back—to see a military cop with lots of shiny accoutrements attached to his chest striding forward, several others in tow.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Who’s asking?”

Obviously, it’s obvious, but he feels like the sass is basically a requirement— _especially_ if this guy has an inkling of who he is.  He’s got a reputation to uphold here.

“Benjamin Varuno, Easy City Lead Officer,” the cop says, reaching up to touch the brim of his hat, like Ed gives a fraction of a flying fuck about introductory propriety right about now.  “Would you like some help?”

Ed is being so goddamn motherfucking patient with stupid questions today that he really deserves a medal.  He’ll have to ask Roy; that’s probably a pretty feasible reward, actually, given the circumstances.  Although Roy will very likely suggest sexual favors instead, which are better anyway, and won’t cost the taxpayers a cen.

“That’d be swell, Officer,” Ed says, in his best approximation of the voice that Al would use, which rides the line between sickly-sweet innocence and scathing sarcasm so closely that a stranger won’t have a hope of identifying which it is.  He nods towards the man rolling onto his side, head clutched in both hands, further down the platform; and then jerks his chin towards the one crumpled and moaning faintly near the wall.  “If you wouldn’t mind terribl—”

Movement beneath him doesn’t register much against the metal knee, but it draws his eye—

And the gunman’s reaching across himself to yank the knife out of his own fucking wrist, turning the momentum of the hauling motion into a swipe directly towards Ed’s chest—

Instincts.  If they had their own intelligence, Ed would be on his bloodied hands and mismatched knees thanking them for saving his ass so many times.

He has the other knife up to block—gunman feints leftward, but the blood’s made his hand slippery, too, and Ed pushes forward, slamming the blade of his knife in against this asshole’s as close as he can to the hilt, then wrenching sideways—

Which jerks it out of said asshole’s slick fingers and sends it careening off along the platform somewhere.

Ed hears the safeties of the officers’ guns clicking off in rapid succession, and there’s barely time to fling both arms out and shout a “ _No_!”

Silence.

He twists enough to look at Varuno, whose face—to his credit—shows confusion only.  Condescension would have brought him right to the top of Ed’s shit list, with a little gold star next to his name.  “Sir—”

“No,” Ed says again.  “A life’s worth more than that—any life’s worth more than that.  And there are kids on that train.  And killing someone _never_ fixes it.”

One of the officers who deserves less credit than Varuno wrinkles his nose.  “What’s ‘it’?”

“Anything,” Ed says.  “This miserable fucking world.”  He pauses, works the paltry remaining spit around in his mouth— “Besides—this guy’s in charge.  He’ll know more than the other two.  He’s the one we want.”

The fuckers accept that rationale so quickly that it makes Ed’s heart clench and his stomach drop, but at least it works, and the guns lower, and he can almost coax his hands into staying steady.

“Right,” Varuno says, and he’s gesturing in some arcane police-y fashion that sends all of his guys parading over towards Ed’s subdued targets.  Varuno himself and another officer come over to Ed, and Varuno offers an arm for Ed to grip to haul himself upright.  It’d be a dick move not to take it—although it’s also sort of a dick move to grab somebody’s nice, clean sleeve when your hand’s filthy with other people’s blood, but Ed doesn’t have a whole lot of other choices as far as that one goes.

When he’s standing and pushing his hair back out of his face—once again trying to avoid smearing blood all over everything; this is like one of those motor skills games that nobody can win; Winry had a thousand of ’em—they start cuffing all of the perps, dragging them up to their feet, and collecting the weapons scattered across the train platform.  Keira’s shutter goes off, and the flashbulb light glints off of the blade still in Ed’s hand.  He offers it to Varuno, who smiles a little and takes it.  He doesn’t do it gingerly, either, so at least he’s not one of _those_ cops.

“Are you supposed to be on that train?” Varuno asks.  “We could call you to get your testimony later if there’s anything the other witnesses can’t explain.”

Ed shrugs.  “Not a whole lot to it.  I saw ’em going for the first-class car—the station records would’ve said that Roy and I were both going to be there.  Rest of it’s pretty much just what you see.  None of them said anything, let alone anything useful for identifying who put them up to it.”

To say that he’s delivered one or two witness testimonies in his life would, as Roy would put it, ‘redefine the concept of the understatement’.

“Shit,” Ed says as the little candle flickers to life in his brain.  “Hang on—I gotta call him—”

He’s scoped out the pay phone and scrambled halfway to it, bloody hand rummaging in his now-bloody pocket for now-bloody change, before Varuno’s even mustered the questioning sound.  Ed will humor him later.  Or maybe not.  Probably not.

He jams the coins into the slot, which requires a bit of finagling with a few of them, because his hand insists on shaking.  He keeps meaning to tell Winry that that’s one of the things he never thought he’d miss—the hand she made for him never fucking faltered when he needed it.  Damn thing was a blessing so many times, in a backwards kind of way.

Apparently he’s glared his own fingers into submission enough that they’re scared now, because they dial the number correctly on the first try.  The line catches on the second ring, which is, too.

“Elric residence,” Roy’s impossibly silky voice says, and he doesn’t _sound_ injured, or trapped, or coerced, or scared about Al, but—

“Are you okay?” Ed asks.  “Is Al okay?  Is Hitomi okay?”

“I’m… flattered to be at the head of that list,” Roy says, slowly.  “Everyone’s fine, Ed; and Hitomi has a little bit of a stomach bug, apparently, but they assure me she’ll be…” Ed tries to release his breath so slow that Roy won’t hear the sigh of relief underneath it, but trying to hide sonorous cues from Roy Mustang is like trying to fool Al with a math code.  “Ed, what’s wrong?”

“Shit,” Ed says.

Roy pauses.  “You may have to be a touch more specific, love.”

A sound a little like a laugh shudders out of him.  “No, I—that was an interjection, not an answer.  Just—” He eyes Keira talking to the trembling ticket window employee.  “All right, before the journalists get to you—don’t panic, okay?”

“…ah,” Roy says.  “My favorite Edward Elric telephone segue.  It’s been so long—how I’d missed the dulcet tones of—”

“ _Roy_.”

“I’m sorry; I’m sorry.  Go ahead.”

“You and your damn melodrama,” Ed says.  “Is that a requirement of the office?”

“It is now,” Roy says.  “I’ll write into law, just for you.  What happened?”

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Nothing much.  Assassins.”

There’s a long pause.

“I dealt with it,” Ed says.

“Good Lord,” Roy says, most of the way under his breath, but it’s followed by: “I’m sure you did.  Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “They only sent three.  And only one gun between ’em.  Which is part of what’s weird, actually.”

“That is a touch suspicious,” Roy says.  “Did they forget who you are?”

“Who I was, you mean,” Ed says.

“No,” Roy says.  “I meant ‘Who you are.’”

He says it in that calm, serious voice he uses for statement of fact—a tone of it almost identical to the one he trots out when he wants his political opponents to sound like idiots for having the intellectual audacity to question what he just said, because it is so, so, _so_ patently obvious that his words were incontrovertibly true.

Ed doesn’t really have time to dwell on that right now, though, so… it’ll just have to wait a bit.

“Whatever,” he says.  Those three syllables have delayed an inestimable number of problems in his life; why stop now?  “Point is—if they’re thinking about it, even if they’re doing a shit job—”

“I agree,” Roy says.  “Your brother’s at the library.  I’ll give him a call and try to get him to stay at home for the rest of the day, just in case.  And I’ll see if I can persuade Colonel Hawkeye or Major Havoc to loiter around the house for a few hours.”

The relief sweeps through him first, with a combination of force and velocity worthy of a tidal wave; and then seeps slowly out to every extremity until Ed can feel it tingling in his fingertips.

“Okay,” he says.

“We’ll be careful,” Roy says.  “You do the same, all right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed says.  “Will you call me later if I forget?  You’ve got the hotel number, right?”

“Oh, no,” Roy says.  “However will I find it if I don’t?  Do you suppose anyone in their right mind will assist the leader of the country in turning up a relevant teleph—”

“Shut up,” Ed says, swallowing down the laugh.  “You reek of corruption even through the phone.  Better wash that off before I get back, or you’re not getting any sex for weeks.”

“Consider it expunged,” Roy says.  “Immediately and permanently, without a trace, because—”

“Shut up,” Ed says again, since apparently it didn’t take the first time.  Well—the first six billion times, since he tends to have to utter a couple dozen iterations every day.  “I’ll talk to you later.”

“Take care,” Roy says, more softly.

“You, too,” Ed says.

He releases a deep, deep breath as he hangs up the phone.  If they thought Roy was on this train—in first fucking class, no less—then they probably concentrated their efforts here.  And if they thought Roy would go down to three mediocre assassins without much in the way of firepower, then they’re probably too stupid to pose much of a threat regardless.

It’s just—hard.  Is all.  It’s hard not to have the world in the palm of his hand anymore; it’s hard not to be able to reshape it when things start to go wrong.  It’s hard not to be able to protect the people who are the most important to him now, when there’s so damn much at stake.

Keira’s standing a few feet away, apparently waiting for him, when he starts towards the train again.  She scuffs a foot against the concrete and gestures to her camera.

“I got some really cool photos of you,” she says.  “I hope—that’s okay.”

That leaves him blinking.  None of them have ever… _asked_ before.  None of them have ever even brought up the concept of him having any remote semblance of input about what they plaster across their front page.

“Uh,” he says.  “I… guess so.  I mean—I can’t stop you.”

She blinks back, so at least that’s nice and equivalent.

“I mean,” she says, “you… can.  You can sue.  Or—gosh, I mean—what you just—”

“Holy shit,” he says.  “I don’t—I don’t beat the shit out of reporters.  I would never—what?”

He glances over, but the officers have finished cleaning up the mess he left and packed the perps off into a car or something.  Varuno is still talking to one of the station employees, but that looks to be about the last of it.

“Uh,” he says.  “Just… whatever.  Print whatever.  My brother’ll freak either way.”

She’s still blinking.  Does that mean he sort of wins this round?  Jeez.

“I think the train’s about to leave without me,” he says.  “So… I trust you.  It’s fine.  Do whatever you want.”

She’s still blinking.  Maybe her eyes hurt.  He did probably kick up some dust while he was kicking all of that ass; maybe some of it irritated her corneas or something.

“You know,” she says, “I—did some research on you.  And I didn’t believe most of it.  But it’s true, isn’t it?  Everything they used to say about you.”

“I have no fucking idea,” Ed says.  “Al’d read the papers, but I’d just tear them up and use the pieces like confetti in Roy’s office when he pissed me off.  I didn’t have time to care what people were saying about me anyway.”

The blinking continues, but it softens a little bit as she smiles.

“I think I gotta get on my train,” he says.

“I hope the rest of your trip is better,” she says.  “For what that’s worth.”

“Thanks,” he says.

And that’s… that.  Whatever the hell it was.

  


* * *

  


Whether or not it has anything to do with the well-wishes—given his acquaintance with the universe, Ed favors the coincidence rather than the good intentions—the rest of the trip proves much less traumatizing than the first half.  The train empties itself out as the stops roll by, so thoroughly that he’s the only one left in his car by the time they trundle into Ishval.  Is it really that remote out here?  Sure, the heat’s a _bitch_ —a dry, heavy, desiccating physical presence dragging at every centimeter of his skin, and he knows he’s going to pay in pain for having the audacity to come here with automail on—but it’s not prohibitively distant or anything.  Are people really that fucking weird about it?  People are just people.  Why—?

That’s a question he would have asked at fifteen.  He knows, now.  He knows how people are.  And he knows how they dress up their own fears with frilly little justifications, and pretty rationale, and they talk themselves into believing that they’re righteous as they spit in the faces of other human beings.  The brain is an incredible machine.  It can twist itself into pretzels trying to make things true.

He has to pry his ass off of the seat when the train stops.  There’s nobody on the platform.  There’s… nothing, really: one of the patent-pending, Amestris-standard gray cinderblock cubes with a ticket window, looking grossly out of place; and… sand.  Lots of sand.  Sand drifting in the scorching breeze, like the out-breath of this city’s hundred-thousand ghosts.

He squares his shoulders and starts towards the gate at the platform edge.  When the platform pavement ends, it’s just… the sand.  Just sand for a long ways before the cobblestones pick up.

It’s—strange.  This place is close enough to what used to be home, geographically speaking, that a part of him thinks that it should look familiar.  It’s not just the ground, either; the skyline is different—the corners of the buildings look softer even though they’re just as geometric; there are designs everywhere, on the walls and the eaves, like daily life is worth decorating.  The tallest structures are the bell-towers, waiting silently, flat-roofed like the other buildings below.  Central and East City and all the other Amestrian landmarks have sharper corners and starker lines, and white marble reigns unchallenged everywhere that people can afford it.  This looks more like Liore.  This looks like a different _world_.

He has no idea where his inn is.  Apparently there are no building numbers, although it looks like the paint on the curbs may be street names, which would be marginally more helpful if he could read a single word of Ishvalan.

Funny, too, or maybe not-at-all-funny, that there was no welcoming committee here, even though East City’s population thought the Führer was on that train.  Is that a slight?  Did they not get the memo?  Did they deliberately choose not to make a big deal of it?  Maybe Ed’s reading too much into it, but it’s been a hell of a day, and now he’s going to have to wander around aimlessly for who knows how long trying to find a hotel that he won’t know how to recognize, so he thinks he’s entitled to some overthinking.

At least he made it.  And at least he had a chance to change out of his bloody shirt, so that hopefully people won’t run away from him screaming any more than usual.  At least he’s here, and he’s alive.

The slow sunset gradually silhouetting the unusual shapes of the buildings goes a long way towards assuaging the disgruntlement.  Is that sappy?  Roy’s rubbing off on him, and not in the good way.

He gets sad, though, sometimes, when he lets himself think about all of the visual things that Roy must miss.  Evidently his ass is on that list, which is… a thing, but there’s so much fucking more than that.  Kittens and really nice cakes, and the smiles of people you care about, and skies like this one—starting out a rich mango-orange and slowly bruising into deep violet as the night creeps closer, and the dark sets in.

He turns a few corners at random, but he sticks to the main streets as best he can; in a place he’s not familiar with, checking out all the little alleys is probably not the best plan he could pull out of his ass, right?

There aren’t very many people out.  It is about dinnertime—maybe that’s why?  He tried to do a little bit of research into the Ishvalan religion to see if they had a holy day—which they do, and it’s Monday, though he’d already booked his tickets like a dweeb at that point—so that he’d know to exclude that as he worked on production schedules and construction timelines and whatever.  He doesn’t remember reading anything about designated times of prayer or anything like that, though—if now was one of those, that could explain why there’s only a scattering of vendors quickly closing up their shops.

Well… whatever.  If it gets too dark, he’ll just… knock on somebody’s door and ask for directions.  It’s good to walk without a destination, anyway; you get a feel for cities when you’re semi-lost in them that you just _don’t_ when you follow somebody else around.

A couple more turns land him on a smaller side-street where there are two little girls kneeling down to draw a complicated shape on the cobblestones with chalk.

His heart skips a fucking beat before his brain kicks in and identifies the squares.

Hopscotch.  Not alchemy.  Not even close, unless you design the board _real_ badly, and you have a seriously interesting way of skipping, maybe.

“Hey,” he says.  “Need some help?”

Two pairs of wide ruby-red eyes fix on him, blink a couple times, and then slide sideways towards each other so that their owners can consult silently.  Ed’s recovering heart clenches up with the nostalgia.  The wordless conversations he and Al used to have when they were that age, and they thought they were so damn smart and so damn subtle—

“Okay,” the younger girl says, slowly.

“Do you know how to play?” the older girl asks, scowling at him.  She’s wearing a faded floral-print dress with shorts underneath it—the better to crouch down with the chalk.  Her knees are criss-crossed with recent scabs, which is also so familiar that it feels like Ed’s whole head is echoing with the past.

“’Course I do,” he says, easing himself down onto the automail knee within chalking distance, but far enough from them that he won’t seem threatening.  “My best friend was the champion at this when we were kids.”

The older girl eyes him.  “They had this game all the way back then?”

Ed stares at her.  “I’m not _that_ old.”

“Yeah, you are,” she says.

He continues staring—but he can’t help thinking about it.

When he was her age, or close to it, he used to think that anybody over sixteen was a towering—not literally, _obviously_ ; in terms of status, not stature—grownup.  He just assumed that anyone who’d lived that long had experienced so damn much that they had to know everything, and they ought to have their crap together by now.  They had to have figured out all of the tricky shit.  They had to have a plan.

Funny how the older you get, the younger you seem to feel.  Funny how the longer you go on, the faster the world seems to whirl around you, and the easier it is to lose track of what you ever fucking came here for.

Funny how you start to need a compass to find your way back to yourself.  Funny how those usually turn out to be people.

At least hopscotch is pretty simple, unless the rules have changed a hell of a lot since back in the day.

…he really did just think of his own childhood as _back in the day_.  Shit.   _Fuck_.  It’s too late now; he can’t retract it; he’s screwed.

“Okay,” he says, slightly faintly.  “I guess I am.”

Funny, too, that he never thought he’d live long enough to say something like that.

Apparently it was the right answer, though, even if it pains him in ways that he doesn’t have the vocabulary to describe, because she nods once and hands over a stub of the chalk.

At least he’s in his element now, although obviously the intent is pretty different.

As it happens, these kids know their way around a piece of chalk and some cobblestones, and it sort of goes without saying that Ed’s never lost the knack he carved out of his own motor skills at the very beginning.  They make short work of the geometric layout—although, fascinatingly enough, the girls add a bunch of little flourishes and curlicues with enormous seriousness, and there are some decorative parallel lines near the top and the bottom that bear what might be an intentional resemblance to the stripes worn on those scarlet sashes.

“Okay,” the older girl says, getting up and absently brushing some of the chalk off of her skirt.  She gives Ed a skeptical look.  “You sure you know the rules?”

The younger girl makes a pouty face that Al would be burstingly proud of.  “He said he _does_.”

“I know what he said,” the older says, matter-of-factly, “but grownups lie.”  She turns on Ed again, raising a challenging eyebrow.  “You got one last chance to ’fess up if you don’t know.”

“I guess the rules might be different here than they were where I grew up,” Ed says.  “Why don’t you guys play the first round, and I’ll watch and make sure I’ve got it?”

The two girls look at each other and then nod in unison.

“Good idea,” the older says, and it’s bizarrely satisfying to have earned her approval.  “Hanna, you go first.”

“I _always_ go first,” Hanna says.  “Why don’t you go first?”

“Because I’m older,” the other girl says, “and I said so.”

The failing light keeps painting their pale hair with sparks of yellow, and Ed is getting the weirdest, most intense fucking flashbacks of his entire life.  They lurch, and they ache, and he’s glad he didn’t have time to eat too much today.

“I can go first instead, if you want,” he says.  “You can just tell me what to do.  And disqualify me if I mess up.”

As it turns out, the rules haven’t changed overmuch since the last time he played this game—which is good news, since that either means that he’s not quite as old as he feels some days; or that the tenets of children’s playtime evolve at a rate tantamount to that of continental drift, and either way there’s something reassuring about it.

When he’s hopped his slightly ungainly, automail-weighted way down the course—including a two-footed landing for the double boxes, of course—and leapt over the box with the rock in it, and then reached back down without tumbling ass over teakettle to retrieve it before finishing up the course, Hanna applauds.  Kaya, the older girl, is less visibly impressed.

“Your turn,” she says to her sister, pushing at Hanna’s shoulder.  “I’ll go last.”

Neither of them has the uncanny balance that Al did at their age, so Ed probably needs to tone down the competitiveness so that he doesn’t smoke them both and ruin the game for them, tonight and possibly forever.  But that’s fine, because cheering them on is honestly even more fun, not to mention much easier on the metal knee.

By the time they’ve each gone a couple of rounds, the sun’s setting in earnest, and their shadows are almost longer than the chalked-out game board.  Hanna, waiting for Kaya to finish another run, keeps shifting her weight back and forth from one foot to the other, glancing around.

“Are you okay?” Ed asks.  Maybe she just needs the bathroom or something; everything’s a big friggin’ deal when you’re five, and Ed can sympathize with feeling like your traitor nerves are possessing you to a degree completely disproportionate to the stimulus.

“We should go,” Hanna says, and there’s a gut-deep conviction in it that makes Ed’s chest contract.  No kid this age should sound that solemn and that scared when there’s still just enough sunlight to play hopscotch by—what the hell is going on?  “Kaya, we really gotta go.”

“One more game,” Kaya says, pivoting on one foot—smoothly at first, and then her momentum tries to tip her, and she wobbles, windmilling her arms for a second before she stabilizes again.  “You were doing really good.”

“But we gotta _go_ ,” Hanna says.

Ed doesn’t like this.  He doesn’t like it at all.

He was already half-leaning to try to be closer to their eye level, since he knows a thing or two about talking up to people and the strain it puts on your neck after a while, but now he crouches down in earnest so that he can look Hanna in the face.

“Why do we need to go?” he says.

Hanna presses her lips together and toys with the marking stone, looking down at it as she turns it over in her tiny hands.

“’Cause we get in trouble if we don’t,” she says.

“It’s called a _curfew_ ,” Kaya says, jumping off of the end of the board and stomping both feet on the ground more vigorously than it requires as she lands.  “Nobody’s supposed to be out after dark, or the soldiers… And it’s _stupid_.  It’s not even that late.  We have to stay inside for hours and hours and hours before it’s even bedtime, and nobody can go out and do _anything_ , and it makes Mom so upset, but Dad said we can’t _do_ anything about it.  He said it’s just the rules, and even when the rules aren’t fair, we still have to follow them.”  She kicks a toe at one of the borders of the board, and chalk dust scuffs beneath her shoe.  “But that’s stupid.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, trying not to let on that there is fucking icewater in his veins, and his heart’s pounding like a prize horse’s hooves.  “Sometimes—well.  I’ve seen a lot of stupid rules in my time.  But you have to be really, really careful about which ones you break.  Where do you guys live?  Maybe we can get you home for now, and we can play some more tomorrow.  What do you think?”

Kaya makes a series of increasingly aggravated faces, and for a second he thinks she’s planning to levy the kind of veto that involves punching him in the area of a vital organ, but then she kicks at the chalk again, huffs a melodramatic sigh Roy would be proud of, and holds out a hand to her sister.  Hanna latches on immediately.

“I guess we prob’ly should,” she says.  “Mom’ll worry otherwise.”  She eyes him.  “You gonna come with us?”

“If that’s okay,” he says, which is a much child-friendlier way of saying _If anybody tries to fuck with you about this curfew thing on your way home, they are going to be eating their own feet_.

“Yeah!” Hanna says.

No one’s feet have to get fed to them during the time it takes Kaya and Hanna to lead him about a quarter-mile through the streets to a little house with shuttered windows.  He can’t _prove_ that his presence helped, obviously, but he can’t imagine that it hurt.  The awful truth of it is that if anybody wrapped up in blue wool saw him walking past with a kid on either side, his coloring would have been significantly more likely to convince them to leave him alone.  He wishes he didn’t know that.

He also wishes he didn’t know for a fact now that there isn’t a single vendor on the street selling delicious fried or grilled or steamed or sizzling anything that he’ll be able to eat, because this unbelievable fucking curfew forced them all inside.

That makes it all the more difficult to do the whole winsome, polite refusal thing when Kaya’s and Hanna’s tired-looking parents overcome their initial startlement and try to welcome him inside.  He’s pretty sure they’re offering him a place at their dinner table because they’re grateful he brought their girls back, rather than because they’re scared he’ll report them to other people who look like him—but it doesn’t matter, really, because he knows the look of a household stretched to the very limits of its means, and there’s no damn way in hell that he’s accepting anything from them.

Besides—he has to get to his hotel, if he can find it.  Even if they don’t have food, which will _not_ do any favors for his current attitude, there’s one other thing he has to take care of as soon as humanly possible.

Fortunately, the hopscotch heroes’ parents know exactly where his inn sits in the city, and they draw him such an awesome little map that that part of the adventure winds up being quicker than the part where he messed around with all the chalk.  Even more fortunately, the inn’s got some sort of traditional stew on the fire, and whatever the meat in it is, it practically _dissolves_ on his tongue, and the whole thing’s a giant sloppy mess of slow-cooked vegetables and salt and sheer deliciousness.

Does that mean he’s used up his entire allotment of good luck for the day?

Only one way to find out.

Maybe it’s the expression on his face, or maybe it’s just courteous customer service, but the Ishvalan woman running the front desk makes herself scarce when he asks to use the telephone.  He’d do this in his room, where he’d be much freer to throw a fit if it came to that, but this is apparently the only phone line they’ve got in the place.  That’s a different problem, though, and it’s way further down his shit list than the one he’s working on right now.

Roy, to his credit, esteem, honor, etcetera, whatever, picks up midway through the first ring.

“Elric residence,” Roy says.

Bastard has _no_ right to go around sounding like that all the time.  Ed doesn’t know how he can live with himself.  Doesn’t he know what he does to people?  This is a violation of Ed’s… something.  Ears.  Dignity.  Legal entitlement to be able to live his life without feeling his knee take on a jelly-like consistency every single time Roy Mustang speaks a syllable.

“Hi,” Ed says.  “It’s me.”

“Ah,” Roy says.  “I was hoping.”  _Bastard_.  Unconscionable.  Ed’s going to file a formal complaint.  “How was the rest of your trip?  Significantly less eventful, I hope?”

“Definitely,” Ed says.  “And I had no idea what to expect from the food here, but so far it’s phenomenal.”

The smile is audible in Roy’s voice.  “I’m glad to hear that.  Glad to hear both.”  He pauses.  “Do you know, I—I honestly can’t… remember.  The food, I mean.  From the last time I was there.  I’m always so intent on other things.”

“I believe it,” Ed says.  “Your priorities are weird.  And so are your tastebuds.”

“Guilty as charged,” Roy says.

“Hey,” Ed says.  “So—I was playing with these two little girls out in the street—”

Roy’s half-laugh is so soft and so fond that it derails Ed’s entire sentence.  “Of course you were.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asks.

“You’re so accustomed to charming people effortlessly that you don’t even recognize your own charisma,” Roy says.

“Don’t you sweet-talk me,” Ed says.  “Did you know they’ve got a curfew here?  Nobody’s allowed out after dark, and they’re not supposed to congregate in groups bigger than three for more than half an hour.”

The silence stretches until Ed has to bite down hard on his bottom lip to prevent himself from needling.  He just fucking needs to find out if Roy—

“I did not know that,” Roy says, and he’s using the particularly delicate voice that means he’s both extremely angry and completely sincere.  Ed tries not to sag against the countertop too much—it’ll aggravate his knee—but it’s just such a fucking relief that he can’t help leaning on it a little.  “Did you happen to learn how long this has been going on?”

“Hard to tell,” Ed says.  “Kids have a weird sense of time and an even weirder sense of politics.”  He recovers the presence of mind to keep his voice down.  “You gotta get rid of this fucking guy.”

Roy’s voice lowers, too.  “It’s not that simple, my love.”

“Yeah, it is,” Ed says.  “Maybe the strategy to do it’s complicated, but you and I both know facts are facts.  One way or another, this one’s got to go.  Post him to Briggs or something.  Put him in charge of their food storage; he can micromanage that until General Armstrong gets sick of it and sets him straight for you.  Problem solved.”

“While I delight in that idea especially if he’s acclimated to his current climate,” Roy says, “it may not be as easy as that.  But I will work on it.  Believe me.”

“I do,” Ed says, and it sticks in his throat in a funky kind of way he really doesn’t like.

The guilt’s circling like a flock of vultures now—he should’ve trusted Roy from the beginning; should’ve known better; never should’ve doubted that Roy could realize how bad this was and not have done anything yet.  Sure, the bastard crams more hours of work into the day than almost anybody Ed’s ever met—which is _hilarious_ when juxtaposed with the good old days of shooting spitballs at the ceiling and trying to lasso them down with paperclip chains—and issues that actively threaten citizens’ lives have to take precedence over civic injustices like this, but…

But speaking of guilt, Roy’s about Ishval knows no bounds and no end and no depths.  It runs forever.  He’s going to do everything he can for these people, and Ed should’ve figured that he wouldn’t ever knowingly let it come to this.

But guilt can paralyze you, too.  It can bury you, and it can make you bury other things.  It wasn’t totally unreasonable of him to wonder if this was one of them—if Roy was stricken and staggered and ashamed that he hadn’t found a way to handle it yet.

“You’re quiet,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “It’s this new thing called ‘shutting up when you don’t have anything useful to say’.  You might wanna try it sometime.”

Roy steamrolls right over the sarcasm, the bastard.  “Are you all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says, and mostly it’s true.  “Just—tired.  And pissed off.  And tired of being pissed off.  And pissed off about being tired.”

Roy laughs weakly.  “I am intimately familiar with that particular mix of feelings.”

“I’ll show you ‘intimately familiar’,” Ed mutters, because he just can’t help himself anymore these days.

Roy’s laugh strengthens slightly.  That’s something—something to go on.  “I will eagerly look forward to that until you get home.”

Not _get back_.  Not anymore.  That’s something to go on, too.  “Figuratively look, you mean.”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “In the meantime, though, I’ll—work on it.  And do some research on him.  Find out as much as I can about who he’s connected to and what he owes them.”

“The old subterfuge game,” Ed says.

“Precisely,” Roy says.  “A word I would regret teaching you if you weren’t remarkably good at it a lot of the time.”

“I don’t see why people can’t just say what the fuck they mean in the first place,” Ed says.  “Subtlety, subterfuge—I hate every damn word that starts with fucking ‘sub’.”

“Mm,” Roy says, very, _very_ lightly, but with the faintest and most tantalizing hint of a voice that he reserves for those rare, crystalline, sticky-throated, heart-pounding moments when Ed is ready and waiting to do his goddamn bidding, because the _rewards_ — “Not all of them.”

“Fuck you,” Ed manages over the instinctual flutter of his pulse.  What a textbook conditioned response.  Roy should be so damn proud.

“Please,” Roy says.  “Vigorously, and as often as physically possible.”

“You are the _worst_ ,” Ed says.  “Can’t you keep it in your pants for five minutes?”

“Of course I can,” Roy says.  “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“Guess not,” Ed says.  “It’s a free country, right?”

“Ouch,” Roy says.

“I’m kidding,” Ed says.  “You know I’m kidding.”

Fortunately, he can hear the smile in Roy’s voice before there’s time to panic.  “Yes.  And I appreciate that you insist on ribbing me constantly to keep me honest anyway.”

“Tough job,” Ed says.  “Someone’s got to.”

Roy makes a thoughtful noise.  “Funny that I have half a dozen people, on the payroll and otherwise, who routinely express variations on that theme.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Funny.”

What that really means is _That’s a pretty clear sign that you’re a good judge of character_ , but Roy will hear that part even if he doesn’t say it out loud.

“Okay,” Ed says before this can get any mushier.  “I’m willing to bet the shitheel in charge here will try to get his fingers in my business, so if I see him, I’ll try to do some recon on my side, too, and I’ll let you know what I find.”  He twists the phone cord between his fingertips for a second.  “If you’re real good, I promise I won’t even tell him where I want to kick him with my left foot.”

“Oh, dear,” Roy says.

“Kneecaps, I meant,” Ed says.  “As an appetizer.  But hopefully it won’t come to that.”

“Hopefully not,” Roy says calmly.  “I would hate for you to damage your foot.  Winry gets so distressed.”

Holy shit, Ed loves him so much sometimes it makes him feel like his brain’s wobbling like a top.

“Good point,” he says.  “Gotta be careful.  You do the same, okay?  Especially after all that assassination bullshit earlier.  You dug anything up on that yet?”

“Not just yet,” Roy says, “although the office was contacted by a Keira who says she has some photographs of the entire encounter, just in case any legal questions come up.”

Ed has to admit—grudgingly, but one of the first lessons he learned in the stupid military was that grudging counts—that he appreciates her thinking ahead like that.  It’d be sort of mind-blowingly dumb if any of the would-be assassins counter-sued for damages after presumably conspiring to kill the democratically-elected leader of the country, but Ed’s seen dumber.

“Cool,” he says.  “How’s Al taking it?”

“With characteristic, terrifyingly frigid placidity,” Roy says.

“Good,” Ed says, and he thinks he even means it, though it’s hard to be sure.  “You—you both be careful.  Okay?  Look after each other for me.”

“Figuratively,” Roy says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

“Hmm,” Roy says, and the hint of a purr’s back in it, and Ed finds his hand gripping the phone way too tight with the sheer force of the gut-twisting desire to shove hard at the center of Roy’s chest and then—preferably immediately—tear his clothes off.  “Are you going to make it worth my while?”

“You are on _real_ thin ice,” Ed says.  “Where the hell do you get off talkin’ to me like that when I won’t get home for two more days?”

“Getting off is sort of the point,” Roy says.  “I’m not particular about precisely where it happens, although I suppose it would be wise to keep it mostly behind closed doors, although if you’re amenable to semi-publi—”

“ _Fuck off_ ,” Ed says, but he’s torn between laughing and trying to swallow a sudden bubble of liquid heat twirling up his throat, so it comes out sort of strangled.

“I love you, too,” Roy says.  “Are you all settled?”

“Not yet,” Ed says.  “Guess I’d better do that.  And stop tyin’ up their line.”

“Goodnight, my dearest,” Roy says.  “Sleep well and come back rested, so that we can do all sorts of things that don’t involve sleeping.”

“ _God_ ,” Ed says.  “You are—something fuckin’ else.  G’night, asshole.”

When he hangs up, he notices that the lady from the front desk is hovering in the doorway.  How long she’s been hovering there is an open question.

“Uh,” he manages.  “He’s used to me talking like that.  I think he really likes it, which is—” He bites off _a masochism thing, probably_ in the nick of time.  “…weird.”

“Who?” the lady asks.

“Oh,” Ed says.  “Mustang.”

She stares at him.  “The Führer?”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Yeah.”

She stares some more.

Oops.

“Uh,” he says.  “What room’m I in, again?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> @all of the wonderful commenters who begged me not to hurt Hitomi:
> 
> OMFG I WOULD NEVER DO THAT TO YOU. IF YOU EVER SEE ME PULL SOME CRAP LIKE KILLING A PET IN A FIC, UNSUBSCRIBE IMMEDIATELY, BECAUSE I'VE BEEN REPLACED BY A SHITTY ANDROID REPLICA, AND THERE SHOULD BE A SPECIALIZED TASK FORCE ASSEMBLED TO TAKE ME DOWN. XDDD


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you guys so much for all of the kind comments!! ;A; As always, I wish I had the right combination of time and energy to reply to all of them individually, but alas, je suis un garbage fire. Please know that every comment gets read and loved, and that you guys are the reason I do this thing. ♥

He’d never needed hotel wake-up calls back in the day, because Al had always just started poking his right foot with a pencil or a fingertip when it was time for him to get up, and then started obliquely implying things about his physical stature if he resisted.  Having a stranger knock soundly on the door is much less fun, although probably more immediately effective.

The good news is, although they don’t any phones to spare, they did build individual bathrooms into this place, so he doesn’t have to launch into a hasty explanation of his life story to any strangers before he can freshen up.

He forgets, sometimes, how much minor suffering ensues when he doesn’t have the familiar conveniences, though—things like a cup of coffee settling in his hand almost the instant he puts his feet on the floor.  His brain keeps fritzing in a fruitless attempt to pull nonexistent caffeine from his bloodstream, and it leaves him swimming through bleary, blurry, uncharitable thoughts.

Thoughts like _Maybe it’s a good thing Roy’s blind, because otherwise he wouldn’t want this, would he?_

He knows that’s not true—or it shouldn’t be; it _wouldn’t_.  He knows Roy was only ever superficial for show.  He knows, too, that Roy sees with his fingertips these days, and those have tracked down the myriad scars so many times that Roy probably has a mental map better than the one Ed can make out in the mirror, since Roy’s felt the ones on his back in equally meticulous cartographic detail.  And he knows that Roy has his own collection of scars in innumerable different sizes, and several of them aren’t what anyone might call _pretty_.  Ed knows that it’s about what they mean, and where they came from; and that being the kind of man who would put himself in front of the dangers that caused them is what’s beautiful.  He knows that skin is only skin, and souls are a hundred-billion times more precious.

Sometimes it’s hard to believe the things he knows.  Time was—and is, sometimes, even now—that everything he believed in seemed destined, if not required, to crumble underneath his feet and fall away.

Still.  Nice not to have to sidle past anyone in the hallway with a towel around his waist and say something that sounds as utterly impossible as _Oh, I used to have automail_.

Minor existential crises aside, he manages to shower and dress himself and head out the door without any other mishaps, and the shops on the street are all open and bursting with colors and smells and smiling vendors this time.  One of them sells him a cup of strong, thick coffee and a pastry-thing topped with cinnamon and sugar—which he is _definitely_ going to have to do some research on, because Al would flip the hell out over the flavor and texture combination—and gives him directions to the Hall of Commerce, where he’s supposed to have a meeting with somebody from the local government who works with something called a business bureau.

Ed’s not sure what the difference is between the different business furnitures, because he usually just lets people that Roy knows point him in the right direction when he’s fumbling around with stuff like zoning and building codes in regular old Amestris, but he wants to do everything _right_ for this one.  By-the-books levels of right.  No guesswork; no question marks; no boxes left unchecked.  He doesn’t want anybody to be able to point to this and say anything negative.

He knows they will, because people see what they want to see and vividly imagine what they want to see when it’s not there.  But he doesn’t want them to have a damn leg to stand on when push comes to shove.

He knows a thing or two about standing on legs, after all, and a _lot_ of things about shoving.

The Hall of Commerce, which is helpfully labeled with the appropriate capital letters, looks incongruously like an Amestrian building—white marble, towering pillars, a truly unnecessary amount of steps in the front, the works.  It sticks out like a sore thumb—wrapped in a huge white gauze bandage, no less—in between all of the Ishvalan buildings, and Ed dislikes it immediately.

He sure hopes that turns out to be unfair.

A very nice young receptionist, whose vibrant red eyes and dusty-rose-colored sash make the granite floor tiles and her stodgy desk even more of an offense to Ed’s sensibilities in comparison, points him towards the rather aptly named Meeting Room 1.  It is, of course, up yet more stupid stairs, but at least Ed has time to chug the last of his coffee, and there’s a bin next to the stairwell to chuck the cup into, and then he squares his shoulders and sets out on his way.

The door just around the corner at the top of the stairs bears the correct number—written in Amestrian, which he side-eyes some more—so he pushes it open and peeks in.  A middle-aged Ishvalan man wearing a button-down shirt and slacks with the sash over the top of it stands from the table and smiles.

“Edward Elric?” the man asks, coming forward with his hand extended.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

If nothing else—and there is so much else, but even if there wasn’t; even if there was _nothing_ —it’s awfully nice to be able to offer people his right hand instead of doing the half-excuses and the awkward shuffle.

“Farin,” the man says.  “It is an honor to make your acquaintance.”

“All mine,” Ed says.  “Thanks for having me.”

“Can I get you anything?” Farin asks.

“Nah,” Ed says, “thanks—I’m good.”  He sincerely hopes, albeit much too late to do anything about it, that he doesn’t have cinnamon all over his chin.

As they settle at the table, he tries not to pay too much attention to the fact that only his toes graze the floor when he sits all the way back in the chair.

“So,” he says.  “Where do you want to start?”

“Ah,” Farin says, with a touch of uncertainty.  He has a pen set down on top of a little spiral notebook; he picks it up, turns it over once, and then gently sets it down again.  Interesting.  Roy’s kind of interesting.  “I’m afraid we may have to wait a few more minutes before Lieutenant-Colonel Wharton is available to join us.”

“What?” Ed manages.

Farin turns the pen over again—a neat, even, extremely precise single rotation.  “It is legally required that he is in attendance at every meeting during which business matters of some significance will be discussed.”

Ed almost chokes to death biting back all the things he wants to say.  It is a good damn thing that he finished that coffee—a _good_ damn thing he’s had enough caffeine to wake up his better judgment.  He’d probably be earning himself a one-way ticket to the Ishvalan slammer for shameless treason otherwise.

“Okay,” he forces out after he’s made what was probably an extremely alarming series of facial expressions while swallowing down several variations on suggested names and activities for Lieutenant-Colonel Wharton.  “That’s—fine.  That’s fine.  Why don’t you tell me about you?”

Farin blinks at him.  “…me?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “What do you like?  What do you do outside of business bureau stuff?  You got a family?”

Farin blinks at him, once, twice, three times—and then, slowly but surely, begins to smile.

It turns out that Farin has a beautiful wife and two kids, a boy and a girl who are seven and four respectively.  He studied business at the university in North City, and it was the coldest he’d ever been in his life; he’d been so eager to return that he’d started writing letters to a childhood friend who had always reminded him of the summer, and they’d fallen in love, and as soon as he’d finished his degree and leapt onto the first train back to Ishval, they’d gotten married in a full religious ceremony.  His father had been a toymaker, and they’d always struggled to make ends meet, which was why he’d committed to studying, in the hopes of helping others in this city succeed where his father, despite all of the passion in the world, had so often grazed the edge of failure.  His father had been extraordinarily versatile when it came to creating things, but the only technique that had really stuck with Farin was woodworking.  He carves game boards and toys and tricky little puzzles for his children at nights and on his days off—and even if the world is changing, and he can see firsthand that mass-manufacture and machinery are the future of entertainment and just about everything else there is, as long as the things he makes can light up his children’s eyes, he doesn’t think the rest of the world matters much.

Ed can’t wait to tell Roy about him—to tell Roy about people adapting, rebuilding, just _living_ even when the odds are stacked against it.

Before he can tell anyone about anything, however, the doorknob turns.

Farin had relaxed in his chair, but he straightens up instantaneously, shoulders set.  The smile vanishes from his face, and his hands fold themselves on top of his notebook.

Ed swivels in his chair to look as the door opens, and a swathe of the all-too-familiar blue wool sweeps into the doorway.  He saw Wharton’s headshot photo in the file, but the guy has filled out quite a bit since then, and he looks… older.  Obviously that makes logical sense; obviously he’s been stationed here a couple years, but Ed can’t help a spike of vindictive satisfaction that this place is wearing on him, just like he’s wearing on it.  Maybe one of these days, the desert will be too much, and he’ll want to leave, right?

Farin stands sharply from the table and lowers his head in one of those respect-nods that Ed never mastered because he never tried.  “Lieutenant-Colonel Wharton, sir.”

Ed puts a hand on the tabletop and levers himself upright without looking away from Wharton—who didn’t even glance in Farin’s direction.

“Mr. Elric, I presume?” Wharton says.

The more years pass, the harder it gets to tell if people are treating him with cautious deference because they know who _he_ was, or because they know he’s close to Roy—whether or not they persist in staunch, desperate, heteronormative denial about why he’s close to Roy.  People like Wharton tend to have a special tone of voice for it, which marries the worst parts of half-suppressed disdain and condescension.  Either they don’t believe that Ed ever done any of the things he did; or they figure that since he’s done nothing noteworthy in a good decade, he isn’t capable of kicking their asses and handing them their own glutes on a silver platter, carved up all fancy-like.

Fuck ’em.

“That’s right,” Ed says, holding out his hand.  “Thanks for joining us.”  That’s what Roy—or, honestly, _Al_ —would’ve said to someone who’s shown up late to a meeting that the rest of the attendees weren’t allowed to have without him.  It leaves a sliver of space for plausible deniability that Ed might mean it sincerely; Wharton is going to have to sit there and try to decide whether he thinks Ed’s enough of an asshole to have greeted him with sarcasm.

Wharton shakes his hand—brisk but not very firm; Farin’s handshake was much better.  Then again, Wharton is probably used to waving away other people’s salutes around here.  How long has it been since he’s had to pretend to care about a civilian’s opinion?

Wharton sits down at the head of the table, between Ed and Farin where they’re seated opposite each other.  That’s annoying, but it’s not exactly a surprise—he wants to be able to see every single document that they pass between them, after all.  The whole point of him being here is to stick his nose into everything, right?

“Okay,” Ed says, scooting his chair in and setting his portfolio-folder-thing crisply down on the tabletop.  “Let’s get this thing going.”  He flips the cover open and starts laying pages out on the table—oriented in Farin’s direction, but where Wharton can see them, because he doesn’t want to cause any more trouble than is… necessary?  Prudent, certainly.  It’s a fine line.  “Here’s some of the blueprints of what we did up North.  I figure it might make more sense to start with a relatively small operation here—we don’t need a whole lot of square footage or anything; a lot of the products don’t need much space.”

Farin follows right along, pointing to pieces of the diagrams and asking clever questions, as Ed makes his way through the stack of visual aides.  Despite the silence, though, he can tell that Wharton is watching closely—he can feel the weight of the judgment, even if the guy’s eyes are mostly on the papers.  Must be hard to listen to the minutiae of the factory design and calculate the monetary value of all of Ed’s suggestions at the same time.

Still, it’s good—good progress.  Ed would much rather have Wharton observant and unobtrusive than the other way around, and Farin’s tearing through his notes with a slow-burn brilliance that he really admires.

Ed goes through the sadly mandatory spiel about how he doesn’t care too much about the bottom line, as long as he can pay his rent, and his secretary can pay hers, since she’s amazing and deserves the best—but he wants to compensate the workers as well as he can.  He knows it’s not going to be an especially exciting job, but he wants them to see in every paycheck that their effort is appreciated, and his one nonnegotiable term of business is that he has to interview all of the supervisors himself so that he can get a sense of their character and how they’re going to treat the people who report to them.

It all sounds simplistic as hell spelled out like this, but he’s learned, bewilderingly, over and over again, that most people don’t seem to operate their business this way, so he has to set it out in so many words at the beginning if he wants to get results.

He’s just started on a basic mathematical sketch of what kinds of savings he has available to put into buying the land and building the place when Wharton cuts in: “You’ll also want to calculate for the tax.”

Ed swallows a twinge of annoyance and skims back over his numbers before he taps his pencil eraser on the little percentage he worked in—maybe a tiny bit triumphantly.  “It’s right there.”

“Not the property tax,” Wharton says, making a little bridge with his hands and interlocking all of his fingers.  “The municipality tax.”

Ed stares at him.

The breath that leaves Farin sounds ever so slightly like a sigh.

Wharton parts his knitted fingers to reach out and lay one on the page below Ed’s projected total.

“Four percent,” he says.  “Of everything.”

At least Ed understands now why this guy is here.

He looks down at Wharton’s fingertip pressed to the sheet of paper under all of the numbers that he scrawled and listens to his heart beating in his ears.  He can’t hit this guy.  He can’t even threaten to hit this guy.  If Lieutenant-Colonel Wharton is well-enough connected that Roy hasn’t been able to touch him politically so far, there’s no way in _hell_ Ed can touch him physically and get away with it.

He probably can’t even say any of the things he wants to—such as, for instance, gems of eloquence along the lines of _How about if I shove four percent of everything in this room right up your ass?_

He waits until Wharton draws his hand back and concentrates on breathing evenly.  Sometimes you can force your brain to calm down if you make your body set a slower pace.

“Everything within Ishval,” he says.  “Anywhere in the city.  Right?”

“That’s right,” Wharton says, more than a smidgeon smugly, and the urge to punch him right in his stupid face looms ever larger in the back of Ed’s brain.  Time was—

Well.  Times have changed.

“Okay,” Ed says.  He turns to Farin.  “How’s five feet past the city border for you?  Would that be too far for people to travel to come in?”

Farin stares at him.  “I—what?”

“Technically that’s the desert,” Ed says.  “Unincorporated.  We can figure out the map part later, but—”

“You can’t do that,” Wharton says.  “You—”

“Why not?” Ed says.  “S’a free country, isn’t it?  Maybe we could set something up—have it right on the river, get a good waterwheel going for some of the power, get some sort of a shuttle boat system or something.  Free transit would probably help for getting people out there, right?”

“I—” Farin’s eyes dart to Wharton, then down to the paper, then back up to Ed's.  Slowly, _slowly_ , but undeniable, Farin starts to smile.  “Most… likely.  Yes.”

“Great,” Ed says.

“You can’t _do_ that,” Wharton says.  “This is my—”

“Your what?” Ed asks.  “Protectorate?  If it was my protectorate, I’d be real glad some of my people were gonna get good jobs, and get to take home some of that _four percent_ to their families so that they can put food on the table and maybe buy some nice books for their kids.  Wouldn’t you?”

Wharton’s eyes have narrowed, and his jaw has clenched.  He’s trying to find some sort of policy to throw in Ed’s face, because policy is all he’s got—the institution’s always been on his side, so he doesn’t even know where else to look for ammunition.  He doesn’t have the slightest idea what it means to make your own way.

“Well, before we count any chickens,” Ed says, rapping his right-hand knuckles on the table—which isn’t nearly as dramatic as it used to be; “we can do a little more local market research here and figure out if there’s a demand for this kind of work.”

“There’s a demand for any kind of work,” Farin says.  Then he pauses, glances at Wharton, and presses his lips together like he wishes he hadn’t just said that.  “Which is just to say—it would be—productive, I think.”

“Perfect,” Ed says, trying to steer the conversation on full speed ahead.  If he’s just obnoxious enough without ever verging on openly disrespectful, Wharton will probably forget any little missteps Farin makes.  “I’ll see about really nailing down the square footage we’re going to need and start a couple of job descriptions based on the positions I’ve got at the other places.”  He gathers his files back up into a stack; Farin grabs a few to help him— “Thanks.  You think anybody’d take me down the river a ways if I asked nicely?  My train’s not ’til tomorrow morning, s—”

A hand plants itself flat in the center of the last few papers Ed was shuffling together, pinning them to the tabletop.

“You are not,” Wharton says, eyes on his, “undermining the authority of the Amestrian government with such a flagrant—”

“Is it illegal?” Ed asks.

A muscle in Wharton’s jaw twitches.  He’s good enough not to let any desperate, flickering-eye searches or hard swallowing give him away, but Ed’s used to reading several books written in invisible ink, two of whom now inhabit the highest echelons of the government in question.  Wharton is currently scouring his memory for any plausible legal reason that he can ban Ed from building a factory on unincorporated land and staff it with citizens who have historically been lining Wharton’s own damn pockets with every paycheck.

Hell, there might even _be_ a loophole there—something written in as a corollary to a code because some asshole general anticipated something good almost happening to Ishval one of these days.  But Ed’s been a gambler his whole damn life, and he’s betting that Wharton has never been challenged before—not here.  Not even once.  Ed’s betting that this guy doesn’t know how to fight back, because no one’s ever had the right combination of sheer guts and special privilege to stand up to him before.

“I’m going to look into it,” Wharton says at last, grinding the words out like every letter is a chunk of granite.  “I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Great,” Ed says, breezily, because he’s never quite been able to train himself out of the instinct to be an asshole in the face of authority.  “Keep me posted.”  He tugs on his papers and flashes a grin.  “Is that everything for now?”

  


* * *

  


Farin takes the stairs down with him on the rather thin premise of seeing him out.

“You are either a very brave man or a very reckless one,” is the comment halfway down.

“Wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard that,” Ed says.

“So I’d guessed,” Farin says.

“That’s one of the nicer ways somebody’s said it, actually,” Ed says.

“I’d guessed that, too,” Farin says.

Ed grins at him.  “You think I’m gonna pull it off?”

Farin’s smile back at him is measured—because the walls have eyes, though; not because he doesn’t want to grin right back.  Ed’s gotten pretty good at reading those, too.

“One can only hope,” he says.

“Ain’t that the truth,” Ed says.

  


* * *

  


Ed crams a lot into the afternoon: for instance, discovering that the distance from the edge of the city to the official border of the Amestrian nation-state is less than fifteen miles; stopping by Kaya’s and Hanna’s house to thank their parents again for the help; dropping into a few Ishvalan building contractors’ offices to ask a series of slightly leading questions; and sampling several more excellent kebabs than are probably advisable.

The bottom line is, today was good.

And tomorrow, he gets to go home.

  


* * *

  


Just as he’s drifting towards sleep, a board creaks in the hallway outside the door to his room.

His brain shakes itself out of the deepening dark around it; something about this…

No footsteps.

The person isn’t walking by—they’ve stopped.

Maybe he’s paranoid.  Maybe all these years of scanning rooftops and checking alleyways and gasping his way free of tortured dreams have finally taken their toll; maybe it’s ludicrous—

But maybe it’s not.

He shifts slowly to the edge of the bed, trying to avoid prompting any noises of protest from the frame—gingerly, he sets his feet on the floor; right first, then left; and then puts his weight on them.

Initially, he’d thought Roy’s melodrama was catching, and that going over-the-top about it was a great way to invite more problems, so he’d packed his throwing knives at the very bottom of his bag.  But after what happened at the train station, he brought them out last night and set them on the bedside table—just in case.

Just in case is now.

He grips the one in his left hand by the handle, and carries the one in the right by the blade pressed between his fingers.  He shifts, slowly, towards the window on the opposite side of the room, watching the faint band of light emanating from the crack beneath the door.  There’s a bit of it that’s blocked by someone’s body, but it isn’t moving yet.

Despite the phone-related austerity of this particular inn, they furnished the room very nicely—there’s a tall, well-built wardrobe near the window, which is what he crouches behind, fixing his gaze on that interrupted line of light.  Maybe it’s nothing.  Maybe the hotel owners are just conducting a normal midnight inspection to make sure everything’s in order; maybe it’s their housekeeper hoping to get a head start on the room of someone who just checked out late; maybe—

Maybe whoever’s there will try the door, gently, which is a _really_ bad sign.

He locked it, obviously, but these things aren’t built to withstand any significant amount of force; probably a good shoulder to the appropriate juncture would pop the knob, or—

They could kick it in and immediately lay down a hail of bullets.

Ed ducks back behind the wardrobe before he can sneak a look, which probably means they didn’t get a good look at him, either—though he had the pronounced disadvantage of having to sling an arm over his face to shield it from the spray of glass as the bullets shattered the windowpane, too, so maybe that’s overly optimistic—

Silence.  Well—not silence; all of the splintering, bullet-riddled objects in the room are settling and sighing and crumbling a little bit.

But silence from the gunman—gunperson; Ed’s not going to make any assumptions here—which counts for something.

He can’t hesitate.  If the human being behind the gun has paused to examine the room as the smoke clears, this marks the single, solitary chance he’ll get to employ the esteemed element of surprise.

No second guesses, no second chances, no looking back.

He shifts to plant his left foot squarely, jerks his right sleeve down over his hand—

Pushes himself up, grabs onto the clearest-looking section of the windowpane, and vaults through the gaping hole in the middle of the shattered glass.

It’s not the first time he’s sliced his hand open, but god _damn_ if every time doesn’t hurt like the first one.

It’s a bright, sharp, furious kind of pain, made all the more acute by how brand-spankin’-new those nerves still think they are, but he doesn’t have time for it—doesn’t have time for anything except kicking viciously at a few of the curved terra cotta roof tiles with the left foot; two break free and go skittering down over their brethren, bouncing off the gutter—

Meanwhile, he scrambles around the corner of this part of the building and _up_ —up to the peak of the roof, over it; clutching his bleeding hand to his chest so that it won’t leave a glaringly evident trail as he fights to keep his balance instead of tumbling all the way down this side of the roof and off into the street—

As he reaches the highest point, in the first moment, he _knows_ for a second that his balance won’t recover—that he can’t save this one; that his ass has a date with the concrete, if he’s lucky enough that his skull doesn’t meet it first—

In the next instant, his body realigns itself in spite of his hammering heart, and he feels himself settling—bending his knees, distributing his weight—and gaining control of the momentum again.

Carefully, now, he picks his way down to the edge of the roof on the clear opposite side of the building from his window, where he crouches down behind the big wooden sign that bears the name of the inn.  It’s a good a place as any—better than most—to watch the street below.

Banging noises, definitely from within.  That answers one question, which was whether whoever came for him is serious enough about it to jump off of a roof after him.  He’s not sure yet whether this is a good answer or a bad one, unfortunately: on the one hand, it could be positive that this person’s not willing to fling themselves off of a building to get the job done; on the other, that’s probably a sign that they’re moderately sensible.  Sensible people are dangerous as _hell_.

The banging resolves into a thundering-steps noise; some ambient chatter and raised voices follow—

A man in a black coat—of course it’s a man in a black coat; there is _no_ originality left in hitmen these days—drags the woman from the front desk out into the street by her elbow, shaking her so ungently that Ed has to bite down hard on the inside of his cheek to quell the urge to tell him where to shove that shit.

“What do you know about him?” the man shout-asks.  “Where would he go?”

The woman’s just this side of incoherent, shaking her head and babbling as she tries—valiantly, it has to be said—to tear herself out of his grip.

She breaks down crying when he draws a pistol and levels it at her forehead.

“Where would he _go_?” the miserable fucker asks again, like she’d have any damn idea; like she’s got anything to _do_ with this—

“Hey, shitheel,” Ed says, standing up and trying not to notice the way his right knee twinges after the recent abuse.  “How’s right here?”

Once again he’s got half a second to turn the shock into a headstart—no leeway to stick around and watch the revelation process on the asshole’s face; hardly time to glance at it and try to remember a vague description to give the police later, presuming that Ed survives this shit—

He bolts to his right—towards the closer edge of the building; one bullet ricochets off of the roof tiles, then two; these are _shit_ odds, and he shouldn’t have played.  Shouldn’t have done the one-liner, at least—should’ve just run.

Can he blame that on Roy?  Surely he never had such a taste for melodrama before he met the master.

Fuck it.  Whoever’s fault it is, he’s stuck with this: today, ‘this’ means dancing across the uneven tiles on one foot that’s sore and one that’s metal; the automail skids with every other step, either catching in the grooves or failing to get traction—

Ten more feet—

Another bullet sings past him so close that it _whistles_ in his fucking ears; his heart rate soars a smidge higher—

He can barely hear his pursuer’s footfalls on the street over the sound of his own; the steel ringing off of the tile sounds almost like a perverted sort of music—five more feet, then two, then—

Up, with everything he’s got; bullets in the air behind him, but nobody ever guesses what he weighs, so even if other people _could_ do the trajectory estimates on the fly—

That’s funny—on the fly.

By a matter of inches alone, he clears the low rampart on the building across the street, but _barely_ still counts; he rolls into his shoulder on the landing, missing having one made of steel, and hikes himself back up onto his feet.  He’s off again before he hears another gunshot—running with everything he’s got left, which isn’t much, but barely counts there, too.

The wound on his hand has given up stinging and started to _burn_.  Bad sign, most likely; one he’ll deal with later, when his life doesn’t hang in the balance.

There’s not a whole hell of a lot to this building, so he gets a good sprinting start and leaps to the next one—he has to build a good lead on the bastard after him before he chances the ground; he can’t risk being level with the gun until he’s sure he can lose the guy behind it.  No sense helping the bastard close the distance.  Sometimes it’s almost nice to be a marginally-smaller-than-average target, after all.

Heart thudding in his ears so loud that he has to strain to listen for the telltale bootfalls of murder-minded pursuit, he makes quick work of one more structure and then slings himself down the fire escape—there’s a dense, warren-like network of little roads and side-streets and intertwining alleyways up ahead.  If there’s anywhere he could lose somebody who sure as hell didn’t look like he was born in Ishval—

Well, if nothing else, as he slings himself down the ladder—rust scraping agonizingly in the gash across his palm—tonight he’s giving a whole new meaning to the phrase _hit the ground running_.  He doesn’t pause to get his bearings; doesn’t pause to look at the selections of alleyways spanning out ahead—just races headlong into the far-right one and hopes for the best.

There isn’t even anywhere to _hide_ —all the shops are shut up tight, doors locked, windows dark.  Fuck this fucking curfew.  Fuck this fucking municipal government, which its petty politics and its self-serving policies and its stupid little laws—

He thinks he might have gained some ground—nobody ever expects quickness of him; maybe the set of his shoulders makes him look slow.  Yeah.  Definitely the shoulders; nothing else to do with proportions.  Obviously.

The point, though, is that the time-tested combination of desperation and practice makes him faster than anybody ever guesses, and it sounds like his lead on the asshole with the gun is increasing, incrementally, as the seconds pass.  The echoes of their footsteps in this criss-crossing labyrinth of backstreets makes it impossible to know for sure, but it _sounds_ like—it must—

New intersections crop up unexpectedly, looming out of nowhere in the dark—he starts picking semi-randomly.  The cobblestones bite into his bare foot, but no time for that either; he hangs a right, then a left, then a right, then… another right, and then a left, and… then there’s a two-way split, so he goes right again—

He bursts out of the network of tiny arcades and stumbles as his feet find themselves on the smoother paving of another main thoroughfare.  He can’t hesitate; he can’t panic; he can’t _wait_ —staying out in the open more or less amounts to painting a glow-in-the-dark target on his own back.

He heads to the right again, trying not to notice how hard his heart pounds, how shiveringly his breath rasps through him, how violently his two sets of flesh-made fingers have started to shake.  He’ll just—keep running.  There has to be a safe place somewhere; some inn must be open; he can dart in and beg for a hiding place.  In the meantime, he’ll run.  He’ll just—sharp right at the next cross-street; sharp left at the next after that; does he hear voices, or is it the galloping of his own heartbeat as he swings around the corner of what looks like a restaurant, and—

Crashes directly into a remarkably solid human being swathed in black wool.

He scrambles back, flailing wildly to force away the hands that grapple for him—maybe if he can—what?  The automail mostly deflects bullets, sure, but shrapnel’s a bitch, and contorting himself into the caliber of limb-pretzel required to protect anything vital will immobilize him so much that it’ll make him a sitting duck regardle—

“Hey, hey,” the human being he collided with says, grabbing for his wrist again—and missing, thank you very much.

Ed blinks, drags in a deep breath, tries to make his eyes focus clearly—

It’s—

Not the murderer who’s been hounding him through the darkened streets.

It is a man in a black coat—well, a man in a black jacket.  A black uniform jacket.  Military police.

“Holy shit,” Ed says.

His right knee goes.

“Oh, fuck,” he says, this time from where he’s sprawled on the pavement, supported by his hands.  One of his elbows quavers.  What a damn traitor.

There are two other black jackets hovering behind the very broad shoulders of the one he smashed into.

“What’s going on?” one, who looks like she’s at least partly Ishvalan, asks, cautiously holding a hand out to him.

He waves it away.  He will get up by his damn self if it kills him.  Hopefully it won’t, but that’s a risk he’ll have to take in order to salvage the last shred of dignity he has left.

“There’s a—” He sucks in another breath, deeper than the last, and holds it for a second.  He doesn’t have much time, but he has to make himself understood somehow.  “Bein’—followed.  Guy with a—pistol, at least.  Maybe—two.  Bad shot so far, but—”

They fall into formation, and then Broad Shoulders makes a hand gesture, and the other two step out in front of him, guns drawn.  “What’s he look like?”

“Tall,” Ed says.  Goddamnit.  His brain is a piece of shit.  “Long black coat.  Amestrian guy.  Couldn’t tell eye color.  Dark hair and a beard, with the—” He gestures around to indicate a vague moustache-goatee-shape thing.

Unbelievably, the officer commanding the others doesn’t throw the incoherence back in his face or mock his pantomime or anything—just nods sharply, looks around them, steps between Ed and the direction he came from, and makes another signal to the other two.

“See what you can find,” he says.  They salute and stride off together, and he turns to offer Ed a hand up.  What is it with these people and refusing to let a guy just… lie on the pavement pitying himself for a little while?

“Thanks,” Ed says, trying to dismiss it without looking like a jerk, which is harder than it ought to be.  He rolls over and plants his left knee underneath himself, then tests the right; that’s a start.  The pavement is less than kind on his palms, and the damage on the right one has realized that stinging won’t garner his attention and taken up screaming instead.

He ignores that, too, and levers himself onto his feet, then upright from there, and attempts to brush his hands off without grinding the dirt and grime and chunks of glass any deeper into the existing mess.

“I need a phone,” he says.  “If you’ve got one.  Do you—is there a station, o—”

A gunshot rends the silence, immediately followed by a howl of pain.

“Shit,” the officer breathes.

Ed would agree, but there’s no time for that, either.

Renewed adrenaline settles his balance like a touch of magic, which probably implies frightening things about his psyche; he and the officer take off in something remarkably close to unison, heading towards the origin of the noise—

One swift turn around the corner of a pale building brings the scene into view—the police officer throws an arm out in front of Ed, holding him back, which is _bizarre_.  He’s always the one who does that.

Fifteen feet ahead, the Ishvalan officer still holds her pistol outstretched, hand shaking ever so slightly.  The man who’d chased Ed lies crumpled on the pavement, clutching his thigh as it bleeds freely onto the street.  The third officer stands just behind her; his holster’s still occupied, but there’s another gun in his hands, presumably repossessed from the predator-turned-quarry who’s mustered enough coherence to give Ed an impressive evil eye.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the Ishvalan woman says.  “I—thought—he was reaching for a weapon, so I thought—I should incapacitate him, or—”

“Why are you apologizing?” the primary officer asks, sounding slightly faint.  “It—that was… Hold on.”

The cuffs come out; a scuffle ensues; Ed’s would-be-killer spits on the officer’s well-shined boots; the officer looks affronted; the Ishvalan woman says “You want another one, or what?” and then looks surprised at herself; between the three officers, they manage to manhandle the assassin up to his feet and search him for other weapons, of which there are a good half-dozen…

And then Ed follows, more than a bit wearily, as they head back towards the station.

“So,” he says, as conversationally as possible, to the culprit.  “You wanna tell me who it is?”

The man glares at him with considerable gravitas for a guy who’s limping, bleeding, and pinioned with handcuffs.  Ed would know; he’s been there.

“Okay,” Ed says.  “Later’s good, too.”

The glare intensifies.

“You know that tells me something, right?” Ed says.  “Tells me you got paid a lot upfront—probably with more on the table after completion—and you don’t wanna burn the bridge.  And I’m guessing it’s somebody you’re a little bit scared of, or at least whose friends scare you a bit.  Silence talks, buddy.  Tough shit.”

The glare transcends ordinary human expressions and very nearly becomes an entity of its own.

Ed grins back.

“You’re… taking this well,” the third officer says, uncertainly, still holding the reclaimed firearms.

It takes Ed a second to realize that the guy’s talking to him, not the assassin.

“Oh,” he says.  “Yeah.  Well.  Second time this trip, so…”

The uncertainty metamorphoses into bewilderment with a whiff of awe.  “Who _are_ you?”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Nobody.  Just… visiting for business.  Y’know.”

“Fuck you,” the assassin says.  Ed doesn’t really blame him.  The glare shifts onto the officer, who startles visibly.  “He’s Edward fucking Elric, you twit.”

The pause that follows makes oceans look rather brief and shallow in comparison.

“Oh,” the officer says, blinking, first down at the cache of confiscated weaponry in his arms, and then at Ed.  “I—oh.  I—can I… I mean, later, can I… have an autograph, sir?”

The Ishvalan officer, who’s been holding onto the cuffs, turns her head so sharply that her hair whips into her face.

The officer in the lead, however, just laughs.

“Sorry!” the third one says.  He does look… younger than the others, by a considerable margin, but— “It’s just—I used to follow you.  In the papers, I mean, not—I didn’t _follow_ you.  Just—the stories about you were a million times better than any of the serials even though they didn’t really have a plot.  I used to leave the house early so I could go through the newspaper on my way out the door, before my dad saw it, and steal whatever pages you were on, and then take ’em to school and hide them under my desk and read them when the lessons got boring.”

Ed looks at the dim street ahead, and at the flabbergasted intended-murderer beside him, and at the equally-flabbergasted Ishvalan officer—whose competence is more than worth a word in a hawk’s ear—and then back to… a fan, apparently.  Is that what this is called?

“I think you and I would’ve gotten along in school,” he says.

It’s hard to tell in the dark, but the officer might be blushing.

“You think so?” he says.

“Yeah,” Ed says.

The assassin looks like he regrets all of his life choices up until this precise second.  Ed sincerely hopes he’s currently listing _becoming an assassin_ right at the very fucking top.

So that’s all right.

  


* * *

  


The instant after they toss Ed’s new un-best friend into the solitary jail cell in the tiny military police office, the Ishvalan officer picks up the phone.

Ed’s exhausted brain assumes, for an embarrassingly long second, that she’s calling Roy.  He opens his equally exhausted mouth to ask her not to incriminate him, because it honestly wasn’t his goddamn fault this time—unless Wharton sent this guy, in which case it sort of was—and then shuts it in the nick of time.

Apparently she gets the gist of the question he didn’t get around to asking, though, because she says, “Take a seat.  I’m getting the doctor over here.”

He blinks at her, trying not to feel extraordinarily stupid, but someone has to say it, right?  “What about… the… y’know.”  They don’t appear to know.  “…curfew?”

She blinks back.

Then she winces.

The superior officer guy clears his throat.  The other one disappeared into their little closet; Ed’s not sure if he just likes it in there, or if he’s trying to find something for Ed to sign, or what.

“The doctor is exempt from the curfew,” the higher officer says, rather delicately.  “There was… we had a woman who was giving birth, and… someone detained him, and she almost lost the baby, so… we filed for an exception.  Eventually Lieutenant-Colonel Wharton was willing to grant it.  So that’s all sorted out.”

The Ishvalan woman swallows, shifts, and then turns her attention intently to dialing.

“Huh,” Ed says, which sounds better than the other thing he was going to say— _I hate it when bad people aren’t_ all _bad; makes things messy and shit_.

“Got it!” the other officer crows from the closet before the tension can settle any thicker—which is the awkward sort of relief that’s also usually Ed’s specialty, but he’ll take it from anybody at this point.  The officer emerges from his coat-bearing confines with a stack of newspapers in hand, flipping through them as he dodges around the corners of the desks.  “This is my favorite one, from after Clearwater, when you blew up—I mean, _allegedly_ blew up—that one bank that was more or less swindling people—”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Ed says.  “Or at least that’s what my report says.  You want me to _sign_ it?”

The officer beams at him.

“Oh, boy,” Ed says.

“Hello, Doctor,” the Ishvalan officer is saying into the phone.  “So sorry to wake you—we have… yes.  Well.  He’s at the station.  It’s—” She glances over at Ed, who holds his wounded and now disgustingly-decorated hand up for scrutiny.  “It’s a laceration.  There’s… glass… and… stuff.”

“Sounds about right,” Ed says.

“Yes,” she says.  “Perfect.  Thank you.”

Ed keeps his hand raised as he turns back—past the lead officer, who’s shaking his head and trying not to look _too_ amused—to the one who seems to think he walks on water, or at least atop the swamp.  “You might have to wait for this to get taken care of before I sign for you.  Although I guess my left-handed signature’s more authentic for those days anyway.”

The guy starts blinking so rapidly that Ed worries about the endurance of his eyelids.  “I—always—sort of meant to ask about that.  If it’s not—private, I mean.  You had—”

“Shit,” Ed says.  “Long story.  How long does it take for the doctor to get here?”

“Couple minutes when it’s not urgent,” the Ishvalan officer says, leaning faux-casually against one of the desks.  “Is that long enough?”

Ed owes these guys one.  Maybe two.  He’s having trouble counting right now, what with the elevated stress levels and the lack of sleep and the overwhelmingly intense desire to pack up his shit and start _walking_ towards home.

“Long enough to get to the good parts,” he says.  “So… how much did you guys hear about what went down in Central when Bradley disappeared?”

  


* * *

  


It’s something like five in the morning by the time he’s been patched up, escorted to the hotel to reassure the terrified receptionist and collect his belongings, escorted back to the police office, and has settled down on a cot they rolled out.  It has handcuffs welded to the frame, which is apparently the extent of their contingency plan if they ever have to hold two criminals here at once.  He tries to snag a catnap—Al would be so proud—to kill time until it’s reasonable to head for the train station again.

The Ishvalan officer—her name is Ara—will be accompanying him all the way back, as several attempts to refuse that hospitality were met with the admittedly convincing rebuttal that the Führer of Amestris’s extremely tired boyfriend getting murdered in his sleep on the way back from Ishval would look pretty bad for everybody, not to mention _feel_ pretty bad for Ed.  He didn’t quibble about the fact that he wouldn’t feel anything, because he’d be dead.

It’s… unnerving, or something like it, though, how deeply it chills him just thinking about leaving Roy behind.  He’s used to it with Al—knowing he’d lay his life down for that kid in half a heartbeat is built into the rhythm of every breath; that’s genetics and family and history and plain old facts, but Roy…

Roy staggers him sometimes.  That’s all.  Sometimes just recognizing how much Roy means to him leaves him reeling.

But that can wait.  He’s got sleep to steal and a train to catch and numbers to crunch and a life to get back to, if all goes according to plan for once in his ridiculous little life.

  


* * *

  


The train’s late departing.  Ed waits for the rest of it—landmines on the tracks, or a couple less-crappy assassins waiting on a platform, or shooters on a roof, or a more-poisoned-than-usual sandwich at the kiosk hitting the pit of his stomach and sending him directly down the road to cardiac arrest—

None of that comes.

Which is a pain in the _ass_ , because he staved off his own desperate need for some goddamn sleep and kept himself alert for hours, just in case.

He learned a lot about Ara, though—she’s half-Ishvalan on her mother’s side; her mother moved to East City to become a schoolteacher, and her father was a doctor at the hospital there.  Ara’s mother went in about some stitches after a chalkboard popped off the wall and clipped her on its way down, and the rest was destiny or something like it.  Her mother always wore a scarf over her hair and tinted glasses to try to deemphasize her features, but one of their racist-ass neighbors sold them out during the war, and soldiers tried to raid their house in the middle of the night.  Her father hid them in a secret compartment he’d built under the bed—Ara’s mother had told him week after week that it wouldn’t be necessary, because she’d dedicated her whole life to helping children here in Amestris, and she knew that giving good to the world had to count for something.  Ara had been able to see the soldiers’ boots through a crack in the wood panel concealing them from view.  Her father insisted that they’d gone back to Ishval to try to protect her grandparents, over and over until the soldiers finally left.

They’d stolen away to Aerugo after that, and stayed for a couple of years—her father had worked as a medic for hire, and her mother tutored.  When the war _there_ started heating up, they returned—tentatively, but Ara had gotten so sick of hiding that she picked the biggest challenge she could think of and enrolled in the military police academy the instant she got out of school.

Roy’s going to like her, too.

At least, he will if this damn train ride _ever ends_.

  


* * *

  


Ed’s trying to think of the aptest word for how he feels as they finally, finally, _finally_ pull up to the station, and his hand drifts towards his suitcase handle without him ever meaning to move.

Bedraggled?  That’s a good one.  Wrung-out, worn-through, battered-down.  Drained.

Exhausted or not, as they pull into the station, he automatically does the safety check that Hawkeye taught him years ago.  It’s burnt into his brain at this point: check the roofs, check the windows, check the shadowed places, scan the crowds, look for loners, watch for glints of metal in places where they have no right to be—

“Oh, my God,” Ara says.  “That’s—that’s the _Führer_.”

It is, of course, with Hitomi at his knee and Hawkeye at his elbow.

“Idiot,” Ed says.  “Should’ve brought Havoc, too, just in case.”

The way Ara stares at him reminds him that the majority of people don’t use _idiot_ a bit like an endearment.

He doesn’t get a chance to explain, not that he has the faintest idea how he’d go about it anyway: smoke hisses, blooms, and curls around the engine, then the other cars; he’s grabbing up his suitcase, and Ara’s on her feet, and they’re heading for the door—

As they approach, Ed sees Hawkeye lean in ever so slightly to whisper something to Roy, who strokes his fingertips behind Hitomi’s ears and smiles.

“Hey,” Ed says when they’re close enough that he doesn’t have to shout it over the ambient hubbub, and he’s relatively confident that Roy can hear their footsteps.  Roy probably knows the cadence of his by heart.  Why does just thinking that feel so damn _good_?  “How’s the shedding machine?”

“She’s doing much better,” Roy says, “and greatly appreciates your asking.”  Ara has snapped off a salute.  “At ease, please,” Roy says to her; and then, to Ed— “To what do we owe the honor of your entourage?”

Either everything is happening very fast, or Ed’s brain is processing inputs unprecedentedly slow.  Roy reaches out to him, hand pausing halfway between their bodies just around the level of his shoulder, so he lays his right hand along the back of Roy’s to guide it towards its destination resting against his jaw.

“Ah,” Roy says.  It’s funny—the kind of funny Ed wouldn’t trade for the whole damn world—how his eyes still light up and glimmer a little when he’s thinking about laughing.  “Does the bandaged hand have something to do with your being accompanied all this way?”

“I’m not telling you a damn thing without my lawyer present,” Ed says.

Roy’s grin unfurls slow and bright and _ever_ -so-fractionally wicked.

“Good,” he says.  He pauses, and the pad of his thumb strokes lightly over Ed’s cheekbone.  Ed wants to check and make sure that the sudden exposure to awkwardness involving a major head of state hasn’t actively injured poor, unsuspecting Ara, but he… can’t.  Roy’s eyes—even as they are, not-quite-focused, not-quite-locked on his—are so captivating that he just can’t bring himself to look away.  “Do you actually have a lawyer?”

“Not telling you that without my lawyer, either,” Ed says.

“ _Very_ good,” Roy says.

“Anyway, it’s a long story,” Ed says.  At long damn last, he shudders free of the worst of the spell, enough to step back, turn away, and gesture.  “Ara, this is… well, you know him.  And this is Colonel Hawkeye.”

“It’s a pleasure,” Roy says.  “Thank you for all of your assistance bringing him back to us, whether he wanted it or not.”

“Whether I wanted the assistance?” Ed says.  “Or whether I wanted to come back?”

“I would like to apologize for any smartassery you endured as well,” Roy says.

“Oh, get fucked, Mustang,” Ed says, and the abject horror on Ara’s face almost ruins it, because it’s _really_ hard not to laugh.  “Most people line up for my smartassery.  Around the block.  We could sell tickets and help fund your crap excuse for a government.  It’s not my fault you have no taste.”

“See what I gracefully put up with?” Roy asks Ara—he probably wouldn’t, if the station weren’t so crowded; he’d probably sense her body language better, or pick up some of those tiny auditory cues he tunes to, and realize that they’ve pushed her just about to the brink of her ability to believe her own senses right now.  “I hope you do, since I can’t.”

“Um,” Ara manages, faintly.  “Y… yes, sir.”

“Good Lord,” Hawkeye mutters, and Roy’s roguish grin takes on a subtle hint of a wince.  “Do you have to go back right away?” Hawkeye asks Ara.  “If you have a few minutes, please—let me show you around Central a little bit.  I don’t suppose a coffee would go amiss?”

“Oh,” Ara says, eyes huge.  “I—that would be—I think I could… I’m technically off my shift, so…”

“Wonderful,” Hawkeye says, settling a hand on her shoulder and steering her briskly off in the direction of the exit.  “What sort of coffee do you like?  Strong, or a little bit smoother?  I swear another shop crops up every time I turn around, so we have more options than…”

The milling crowd swallows them.  Roy’s hand lifts and hesitates again, so Ed seizes on and raises it to his own face again.  How did that get so _normal_?  Doesn’t matter, really.  Not much does when Roy’s brushing his hair back like that, with a softness to his expression like he’s savoring every second that he gets to feel it between his fingertips.

“You’re all right?” Roy asks.

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “You?”

“Nothing untoward happened here, interestingly enough,” Roy says.  “At this point, I’m tentatively guessing that they assume—rightfully, perhaps—that I’d be more vulnerable traveling, and they’re not sure that they want to come for me when I’m in my element on familiar ground.”

“You should’ve brought another bodyguard, though,” Ed says.  “Not that I think Colonel Hawkeye can’t do it, or anything, because that’d be the dumbest thing I’d ever said, but—”

Havoc chooses that precise moment to saunter over, toothpick swinging at the corner of his mouth as he grins.

“Hey, boss!” he says.  “Trip okay?”

“Sort of,” Ed says.  “Where the hell were you?”

He’s in plainclothes with a cap on, which is why Ed believes him when he just sort of waves a hand vaguely.

“Around,” he says.

“Jeez,” Ed says to Roy.  “Next time I try to doubt you, tell me to shove it up my ass.”

“Your ass is sublime,” Roy says.  “I can think of so many more pleasant things to do with it.”

“O _kay_ ,” Havoc says, loudly and with an alarming amount of cheer.  “Glad we got that sorted out.  Good talk, team.  Gee, boss, you sure must be tired.  You ready to go?”

“You know that if you react,” Ed says, “it just encourages him, right?”

Havoc grimaces.  “A man’s gotta live in hope.”

Roy reaches out again—and anyone who didn’t know him, and didn’t know that he can’t see what he’s doing, wouldn’t notice that his arm swings a little wider than it needs to before his hand finds its target—to clap Havoc on the back.

“That’s the spirit,” Roy says.  “Just for that inspiring display of loyalty, I’ll keep the necking to an absolute minimum while we’re in the car.”

Havoc’s grimace intensifies.  “Gosh.  You’re the best, Chief.”

Roy pats his shoulder.  “Don’t worry.  I know.”

  


* * *

  


Apparently Havoc’s been something like a saint in Ed’s absence; no notable amounts of necking whatsoever take place in the car, which is a touch disappointing to Ed’s animal brain.  The rest of his brain, of course, recognizes that he’s fucking beat and shouldn’t pay attention to the disgruntled muttering from the part of him that wants Roy’s teeth on his throat for as much of the day as is physically possible, and is more than satisfied with the fact that Roy’s warm arm settles around him instead, and Roy’s head leans against his.

“What’s on the agenda for when we get home?” Roy asks.

“Huh,” Ed says.  Having to think about it is a bad sign; his mid-range to long-term planning is pretty much nil right now.  “Shower, snack, sleep.  I think in that order.”

Roy’s head shifts, and his mouth brushes against Ed’s ear.  Nothing suggestive, for once—just… tender, or some shit.  Ed can’t believe he fell for all of this sappy romance crap in the first place, let alone so _hard_.  “I’m sure all of that can be arranged.”

“Hopefully without a committee,” Ed says.

“We have several too many of those,” Roy says.  “Fortunately, this I believe I can handle.”

“Good,” Ed says, and closes his eyes—just for a second.  Just to give them a rest.

  


* * *

  


Predictably, perhaps, he wakes to a murmur of the velvet voice: “We’re here, dear heart.”

“Ugh,” Ed manages.

“Succinctly put,” Roy says.

“Thanks,” Ed says, which was not exactly brilliant, but at least a speech neuron had to fire to formulate it.  Dragging his body over to the car door to open it becomes a struggle, since all it wants to do is snuggle up with Roy’s shoulder again and go back to sleep.  “I’m getting too old for this shit.”

“Staying up all night burning sheer adrenaline, you mean?” Roy asks, casually, sliding across the seat to follow him out.  Hitomi scampers out after them, looking vaguely offended at the indignity of her exit.  “Shame.  I have a few ideas for other activities that might have the same res—”

“Oh, God,” Havoc says, crumpling in the driver’s seat.  “We were so close.   _So_ close.  I really thought we were gonna make it.”

Roy’s smirk is not kind on Ed’s already wobbly joints.  “I would have thought you’d have learned not to underestimate me by now, Major.”

Havoc sighs feelingly.  “Yeah.  Thanks for the reminder, Chief.  Have a nice day, sir.  You, too, Ed.”

“You have a lovely day yourself, Major,” Roy says cheerfully.

The next sigh lasts long enough for Havoc to roll the window all the way back up without taking another breath.  Pretty impressive lung capacity, really.

Roy’s arm wraps itself around Ed’s waist, and then he’s trying to figure out where in his luggage he stashed his keys as they stagger up to the door, Hitomi in tow.

“Hey,” Ed says.  He doesn’t _want_ to say it, exactly, but he can feel it bubbling at the base of his throat, and if he doesn’t release it, he knows it’ll scald him all the way up the inside of his esophagus.  “I really—missed you.”

He’s learning.  It’s hard—a stark sliver of terror still lances through him sometimes, when he dredges up this stuff and gives it voice, because for _years_ the vulnerable feelings were the only secrets he still had.  Emotions were the weak spot.  Everybody and their mother knew how to rile him up by needling his temper, and a few of them knew how to tear him to pieces by going for the really broken bits.  It’s still scary, some days, to tell the truth like it’s plain and simple—uttering a feeling like that, however flagrant it’s been inside his head for the duration of his absence, still feels like inviting destruction by way of a gilt-lettered invitation topped with a little ribbon bow.

Roy’s not scared, though.  Roy’s gotten progressively less scared about it in the time they’ve spent together, Ed supposes because it’s the only place on the planet now that he _doesn’t_ stand to lose big by displaying the softest parts of himself.

And Ed loves them—the soft parts.  Whether he says it or not.  He loves them so much that he knows that Roy can hear it, even if most of the time the words won’t come.  Roy’s hearing is incredible these days, and he’s always had a knack for knowing things that Ed hasn’t even said yet.

“I missed you, too,” Roy says, gently, lightly—like it’s an observation about the weather, obvious and incontrovertible.  “Sometimes I find that the brief trips are worse, in an odd sort of way, because it feels so pointless to have to be apart at all.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  He pauses at the door.  There are not nearly enough bolts on this thing after the weekend he’s had.  “You think we can jack up our security here without the press getting a hold of it?”

“Yes,” Roy says.  “And I think that’s a fine idea.”

“Okay,” Ed says, fitting his keys into the first of the lock; and _okay_ is an understatement, but—well.  Roy’ll get it.  That’s the whole point, really.

  


* * *

  


“What would you like to eat?” Roy calls from the kitchen as Ed attempts to navigate the acquisition of a towel and some clean underwear without banging his head on any of the shelves or the drawers, which is far more difficult than it ought to be.

“You want the real answer?” Ed asks.  “Or the sexy answer?”  While Roy’s laughing, Ed picks for him: “I really don’t care.  Anything.  Just want some carbs so I can crash like a motherfucker and not starve to death while I sleep for a year.”

“That sounds like a magnificent plan,” Roy says.

“All my plans are magnificent,” Ed says.  The corner of one of the drawers almost nabs him on his way up, and his life flashes before his eyes a little bit.  “Hey, maybe I should be Führer.”

“You’re welcome to it,” Roy says.  “I’ll stay home and write odes to your hair and sonnets about your ass.”

“Eew,” Ed says, poking his head into the kitchen—not that Roy can see his disgusted expression, but sometimes he thinks proximity helps convey it anyway.  “Never mind.  Canny political move there, by the way.”

Roy beams at him shamelessly.  “I try.”

Ed crosses the kitchen, pauses halfway to lean down and pet the cat that’s making like it’s about to butt its head at his ankle in a way that might topple him, pets Hitomi when she looks jealous, and then finally reaches Roy.  It would be fitting at this point to pet him, too, but Ed’s objective was specifically to sling both arms around him and feel the pressure of Roy’s body on every goddamn hard-earned square centimeter of skin on this right arm.

“Thanks,” Ed says.  “For whatever it is you’re gonna make.”

“Don’t say that until you’ve tried it,” Roy says, smoothing his hair back off of his forehead to prime it for kissing, which is utterly disgusting and remarkably great in equal measure.  “Which is to say… you’re very welcome.”

  


* * *

  


Approximately midway through the shower—difficult to be sure when time keeps muddling itself like this—Ed realizes that he laid this out in the only sustainable order.  If he didn’t have food to look forward to, he’d just stay here under this beautiful warm stream until he passed out and very likely cracked his head open on the porcelain tiles; if he’d eaten first, he would just have crawled into bed afterward a filthy, sweat-matted mess.  If he’d gone for the nap first, obviously, he probably would’ve just slept until his corporeal form imploded.

It’s nice to be getting something right on the first try for a change.

Some number of minutes later, it occurs to him that he’d better get out of this shower, glorious as it may be, before Roy starts to worry about him, so he counts out twenty more luxurious seconds and then shuts off the water.

As consolation prizes go, Roy’s bathrobe ranks high.  It’s big and unbelievably fluffy and soft and warm and smells like him, and it’s perfect for occasions like this one, when Ed’s too damn tired and too damn hungry to care about spending much time toweling at his hair.

“Okay,” he says as he steps back into the kitchen.  “What’s the damage?”

“Everything’s on fire,” Roy says calmly.  One hand sweeps across the countertop, lightly, until it hits the edge of a plate, which he lifts up and holds out.  “But there’s a sandwich in it for you.”

He says the word like it’s trivial, when what occupies the plate is anything but.  What occupies the plate is less a sandwich than it is a combination monument and miracle that happens to have momentarily been fixed between some bread.

Ed has just enough capacity for critical thinking left in him to know that it’s not just the fact that he’d eat pretty much anything arguably edible right now: the sandwich being proffered to him is, in fact, a masterpiece.  A magnum opus.  A marvel, a triumph, a—

“Shit,” he says.  Hopefully that sums it up.  He steps forward and takes the edge of the plate in both hands, firmly so that Roy will feel that he’s got a grip on it.  “You’re…”

“Fretting about you endlessly,” Roy says, before Ed can generate a less-embarrassing way to say _the best, except for Al, but that’s just baseline—I mean, you’re fucking amazing, you know that?_   “Here, come on.”  Freed of the plate, his hand settles on Ed’s arm, and there’s a sliver of a smile as his fingertips find the terrycloth of his own robe, and then he guides them over in the direction of the table.  “You’re not wearing pants, are you?”

“Still don’t have my lawyer,” Ed says.

“Sometimes,” Roy says as Ed pulls out a chair for each of them, and Roy sets his hand on the back of one before he settles into it, “I think that it’s better that I can’t see you, since I suspect that you may exist entirely to torment me.”

“And to give you shit,” Ed says.

“And to eat me out of house and home,” Roy says.  “Which you should start d—”

Ed doesn’t have to be told _that_ twice.  Usually he doesn’t have to be told that once, but reuniting with the fucker you’re in love with is remarkably distracting when your brain’s already spinning a bit.

While Ed inhales the immense stack of meat and vegetable-things and sheer delight that Roy manipulated into a sandwich shape for him, he periodically pauses between swallows long enough to tell Roy the whole story from the start.

Roy’s concern about the question of whether the second assassin was sent by the same person, people, or entity as the first group—or whether it might be Wharton’s doing—manifests in the finger-tap-on-the-table fidget.  Ed likes that one a lot, somewhat in spite of himself.  It’s not his damn fault Roy has such good _hands_.

“Interesting,” Roy says, which means _Oh, fuck_.  “I’ll look into that.”  He pauses.  “In a manner of speaking, of course.”

Ed glances down at his plate.  His magnificent sandwich has somehow vanished, which means he probably has about five minutes left him him before he drops to the floor and sleeps on the carpet and snores in some cat fur that will ferment in the bottom of his lungs for the rest of his days.  “Can it wait ’til after I take a nap for, like, ten years?”

“Of course,” Roy says.  One of his wonderful hands sweeps along the edge of the table to orient himself, and then he leans on it to lever himself up, at which point he offers the free hand to Ed.  “No time to waste.  Shall I wake you on the first day of year eleven?”

“Perfect,” Ed says.

  


* * *

  


Ed wakes up what feels like several smudgy hours later, to a bedroom that would be dim if it wasn’t for the stacks of illuminated documents in various stages of being read all around Roy.  Something damp resides between his cheek and Roy’s collarbone, and he has a pretty strong inkling about what it is.

Sure enough, as he levers himself up just enough to check…

“Shit,” he says, managing to slur slightly less than he does when he’s inadvisably intoxicated.  “Drooled on your shirt.”

“It’s just a shirt,” Roy says, with this mild little smile that just—

Damn it.

“It’s the shirt of the Führer-President of the great nation of Amestris,” Ed says, rubbing at the wet spot uselessly with a bit of Roy’s bathrobe sleeve.  “And I dribbled on it like a dog.”  A soft rustling alerts him to Hitomi raising her head where she’d settled on the floor near the foot of the bed.  “No offense.”

“The Führer-President treasures your spit,” Roy says, setting enough papers aside to catch Ed’s hand in both of his instead.  “Like he treasures every other part of you.  It’s all right; just leave it.”

“You,” Ed says, “are a fucking sap disaster.”

“ _Your_ fucking sap disaster,” Roy says delightedly, “for as long as you’ll have me.”

“Barf,” Ed says, which is easier to articulate right now than _I was figuring on forever_.

“That might be a slightly more challenging substance to treasure,” Roy says, “but I swear to you I’ll do my be—”

“Shut _up_ ,” Ed says, but his traitor lungs keep trying to laugh.

“I also treasure the verbal abuse,” Roy says, and he’s shifting to do the terrible, awful, utterly unfair thing where he props one elbow on the pillow and leans his head on his hand, which makes him look like a model and sends his hair sliding into his face, at which point Ed always wants to kiss him until they both asphyxiate.  “That’s part of your charm.”

“I don’t have any charm,” Ed says.  “Save the bullshit flattery for the politicians.”

Roy feigns a thoughtful expression that might be convincing if they hadn’t sauntered down this road a thousand times before.  “I’m not sure it would be prudent to tell Hakuro he’s charming, but perhaps you’re onto something; maybe that’s the breakthrough I’ve been missi—”

“ _Can_ it,” Ed says, but he’s laughing hard enough this time that he couldn’t deny it if he tried.

The doorknob turns, the door opens, and Al’s head appears in the gap.

Ed extricates himself from the cozy tangle so fast and so recklessly that he just about faceplants on the floor—Hitomi’s judging him again, but he doesn’t really blame her—on his way to finding his feet and staggering across the room to drape himself on his angel brother.

“Welcome back,” Al says, patting his back.  “I understand it was a bit more exciting than you wanted.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “You seen anybody suspicious or anything?  You have to be careful.  Really fucking careful.  I got two in two days.”

“I’m keeping an eye out,” Al says, patting Ed’s head now, which is, unfortunately, not _quite_ annoying enough to compel him to release his vise grip on Al’s torso.  “Er—sorry, Roy.  Anyway, I took a different route back from the university library yesterday and today just in case, but I haven’t noticed anything unusual yet.”

“No news is good news, I guess,” Ed says.  He finally manages to convince his body to un-twine itself from around Al’s, at which point it can’t decide whether it wants to stay here and leech Al’s warmth or dive back into the bed and steal Roy’s.

“Except when the news involves pictures of you in the paper,” Al says, “looking so badass that I can’t believe a _second_ idiot tried to take you on after that went to print.”

Ed stares at him.  Al doesn’t drop words like that for no reason.  Is he—is he sick?  Is something—

“What?” Al says.  “It’s true.  You looked like you could take on the whole world, simultaneously, and the story _specified_ that you’d disarmed two men with knives and one with a gun.  I can’t believe your second assassin’s higher-ups didn’t get the memo.”

“Maybe that’s our problem,” Ed says.  “We need to boost circulation of the _Central Times_ so that the people who really need to read it will end up with copies of it, and they’ll finally realize they should leave us the hell alone.”

“That is the most positive thing I have ever head you say about the press,” Roy says.

Ed shrugs.  Roy will sense it.  “Desperate times.”

“Quite,” Roy says.

“Are you posing for a magazine spread, Führer Mustang?” Al asks, because of course Roy hasn’t changed his position one whit since Ed’s impressionable baby sibling walked in.

Roy winces.  “I’m sorry for this in advance,” he says.  Before either of them can respond—or scream, possibly—he unfurls a smirk and goes on, “Not the kind of spreading I’m interested it, but—”

“And _that_ would be my cue to leave,” Al says, flitting out through the door so fast that Ed blinks and then barely sees a shadow.  “If you need me, I’ll be in the kitchen, making dinner and ruing the very day I was born.”

“The day you were born was the best day ever,” Ed calls after him.

“Easy for you to say,” Al calls back.

“Dramatic much?” Ed asks.

“Nyah,” Al says.

Ed closes the door, adjusts Roy’s bathrobe, pads back over to the bed, and climbs up to fit himself in against the side of Roy’s ostentatiously-angled body.

“You’re terrible,” he says.

“I regret to report that I am not sorry,” Roy says.

Ed nestles in and pulls the covers up over both of them even though Roy’s still wearing day-clothes, and some of the papers get caught underneath.  “I think I can live with that.”

Undaunted by either problem, Roy settles with him, stroking at his hair again and gazing out into the middle distance—well, the middle darkness—somewhere past Ed’s cheek.

“That,” Roy says, “is the important thing.”

Ed lays as still as he can for a long couple of minutes, savoring how sensitive his skin is to the impressions of Roy’s fingertips when he keeps his eyes closed.  Maybe there’s that—in a shitty sort of way.  Maybe Roy appreciates touches all the more because he doesn’t have as many other options.

“Really,” Roy says, softly, after a while.  “You’re all right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “After some of what we did back in the day, this isn’t even a blip on the radar.”

“Still,” Roy says.

Ed opens his eyes a crack and plays with the buttons on Roy’s shirt.  Those are going to hurt if Roy falls asleep here.  Clearly the only solution is to strip him naked as soon as possible.  Ed would’ve done it by now if he wasn’t so damn sleepy.

“It’s fine,” he says.  “Just—makes me—worried about what’s next, I guess.  Y’know.  If this is the start of something.  What’re we gonna do next?”

“The best we can,” Roy says.  “Day to day, moment to moment.  One instant at a time.  How does that sound?”

Ed looks up at him for a long second—soft eyes, smooth jaw, shoulders relaxed while they’re here in their sanctuary, gray gathering at his temples too intently these days to be ignored.  He’s fucking gorgeous, and he’s _here_ , and there’s no place in the world better than this one at this moment.

As soon as Ed feels like he only traveled on trains, rather than feeling like he’s been hit by several of them, he’s going to talk to Colonel Hawkeye about freeing up a little wiggle room in Roy’s schedule, and then take him on that little Cretan vacation some weekend as a surprise.

For the moment, though, he reaches up and drags his fingertips through the silky fall of Roy’s hair and wrinkles his nose as Roy leans into the touch and then makes a big, stupid show of nuzzling at his hand.

“Eh,” Ed says.  “Worth a shot.”


End file.
